Good friendships belong to the most important elements of happiness. It is undisputed that we usually experience real happiness together with others. However, for many of us, reality looks different. In our society, more and more people feel lonely. This has nothing to do with having many “friends” on Facebook or ‘followers’ on other social media platforms. It is about the quality of the relationships that you have with people who are important to you. The smart makers of Facebook have hijacked the term “friend”. In the past, everyone knew what true friendship was. Someone you are close to and know you can go through thick and thin with. No need for further explanation. Today, the term “friend”, when meant seriously, does need explanation. Friendship manifests itself in mutual understanding and support, the joint experience of beautiful moments together, self-affirmation, fun, and mutual inspiration and influence that helps us learn and grow. Good friendships are maintained for mutuality and caring. This presupposes that both sides invest about the same energy in the relationship in the long run. Invest in friendships with people who are willing to give back and you will see how your quality of life changes and your bitter feeling of loneliness is replaced by inner equilibrium and happiness.
People who make you happy can change your mood in an instant. Just be sure you choose carefully. Know who you enjoy being around, who brings you up, and who encourages positivity. Anyone who doesn’t fit this bill is not worth your time, ever. Life’s too short. Choose wisely. In some cases, you might feel rejected when it seems like you’re keener on becoming a friend than the other person. Or you feel bad because you get the impression that your friends use you for their personal purposes, or are taking advantage of you or your position without any reciprocity. This can hurt, makes you feel bad about yourself, and undermines your happiness. The worst is indifference. It is even more harmful than open rejection. People who are permanently devoted to their hedonistic fun and self-presentation cannot successfully invest in true friendship. Their demonstration of disinterest is frequently not a real rejection or lack of sympathy but just a sign of indifference. The late Holocaust survivor and Nobel Peace Prize laureate said,
“The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”
Elie Wiesel
What he said about love can also be said about friendship. Bored disinterest and indifference reduce the other person to a mere abstraction. This neglects social relations, which can have a negative impact on true friendship and happiness. By choosing the word “friend” for a person who is only marginally interested in you, respectively, whom you don’t consider an emotional friend is hijacking a precious word for an empty shell. That’s what Facebook has done. It is the quality of friends with which you surround yourself on your own terms, which will make you happy. Friends can balance out frustrations or anger, help to manage your fears, share your joys, restore imbalances, and can lead to more happiness. Beware of ‘friends’ who pretend to be friends. A warning signal is the ‘one-way’ relationship. If someone is actively inviting his friends for social activities or to his home and soon realizes that he does not receive anything in return, neither a caring call, nor a friendly unsolicited message, nor an invitation for joining a common activity, then there is no true mutual relationship. Especially important for “lived” friendship is mutual giving and taking. Not everyone has the talent for playing the great entertainer, creating new ideas again and again, or stimulating the group to engage in joint activities. But there are countless other occasions for these people to show that they too, can make a constructive contribution to the group’s joy of life. Take stock and try to be honest with you. Don’t fall into the trap of vanity or prestige-oriented thinking: Look around and see which people make you feel really good and which give something valuable in return for your own sympathy, hospitality, initiatives, and positive emotions. After having taken stock, you will know pretty well with whom you find that you should spend most of your time and with whom you can do great things together. Don’t waste your time or your precious emotions with people who make you feel uncomfortable. Although it may be painful in some cases to break the connection to people who have been in your life for a while, you need to engage in searching for yourself and the truth. You’ll realize very quickly that only a few people will really qualify to be called ‘real friends’. Surround yourself with these people as they will make you feel HAPPY.
EXAMPLE
You should be particularly suspicious if someone says/writes: “I’m missing you so much”. This can be sincere. But it can also be the highest level of falsehood and hypocrisy to mislead you further into believing that you are dealing with a ‘friend’. You can quickly clarify any doubts by innocently asking: “If you miss me so much, what prevented you from taking the initiative to contact me?” Or if someone responds to your contact initiative with the sentence: “Long time, no see”. This almost sounds like a reproachful accusation that you failed to take the initiative earlier. Your innocent question back should be: “Yes, what prevented you from shortening the long break you complain about?” Also great are the ‘friends’ who turn up to your invitations but let you know halfway through the evening that they have an early tennis lesson the next morning and ‘unfortunately have to leave your super-party early’. The lie becomes particularly obvious when they take a whole swarm of your other guests with them, skeletonizing your party, so to speak, only because there is something ‘better’ somewhere else. This selfish behavior doesn’t make you feel happy because you feel that your ‘friends’ are false friends. And if these false friends would really be honest with themselves, then they are also not at peace with themselves and happy, because they know best that they have only built a world of appearances around themselves that doesn’t let them be happy in the long run either.
Excerpts from the book “HAPPYxCOOL: Happiness in Relationships and at Work” by Rudolf Beger and Sara Wong, Penguin, 2021 avilable on Amazon, Goguru, and Kinokuniya
© EIPOP-drawing Rudolf Beger
