The Latest Advice Craze: Get New Friends And Become Smarter And More Successful

I guess it had to happen. The economic indicators all look good so we can’t blame the economy. Stories abound of kids of all ages getting rich despite lack of education or experience, so forget that as an excuse. Businesses are succeeding with little or no funding, so we can’t pin it on lack of funds. What’s left to blame for lack of success? It must be the company one keeps. So, dump the downers and swap them for new friends for fun and profit.

Articles are cropping up like this one from The New York Times: The Power Of Positive People: Are Your Friendships Giving You A Boost Or Bringing You Down?

And how about this one: You Are The Average Of The Five People You Spend The Most Time With.

Here are the messages from articles like this:

• The purpose of friends is to help you get what you want.
• People can be put into categories according to predictable behavior — takers vs. givers, always helpful vs. always in need of help, nourishing vs. toxic — and be expected to stay there.
• Successful people must be very calculating about those with whom they associate.
• Keep your distance from someone behaving badly because bad behavior is contagious.

If enough people take this advice to heart, we’ll end up with a society that’s cynical and self-centered, carefully curating our friendships as tools, selecting or rejecting people on the basis of their capacity as resources to help us achieve our very important personal life goals.

Picture everyone acting like the bad guy from the 1981 Burt Reynolds movie Sharkey’s Machine who says menacingly: “I draw a straight line to what I want…” Or, imagine a sci-fi film about people who create their own robotic “friends,” programmed to be helpful and supportive at all times.

Folks, this would be funny if it weren’t so serious and more easily dismissible if it weren’t capable of turning into a full-blown epidemic.

This stuff is plain foolishness that won’t get you any kind of success, unless you count being labeled as a selfish egotist who tries to rig every relationship to his advantage.

• Humans are creatures who crave affiliations, all kinds of affiliations. People come into and go out of our lives at various times for various reasons. Some of those reasons are clear from the start and some we never understand. Some we think are good reasons, and others not so good. But it seems fundamentally corrupt to enter or exit a relationship for the purpose of getting something you want, even if it’s as high-sounding as “making you a better person.”
• Sometimes the people in our lives need us more; sometimes we need them more. It changes, sometimes moment by moment. Someone behaving badly might need help rather than rejection by the “Friend Selector Machine.”
• If you try to “screen” every potential acquaintance, you’ll take all the spontaneity out of life and frankly give everyone around you the creeps, and probably end up “choosing wrong” most of the time anyway.
• Sure, people sometimes behave badly. But mercurial behavior comes with the territory in all kinds of interpersonal relationships. We’ve come to expect that from a lifetime of experiences and, as adults, we accept responsibility for dealing with negative things as they arise. And the idea of banishing people from your midst because you suspect they might be a “bad influence” on you sounds like applying what might be considered a “good parenting technique” for an adolescent. Seriously, are you really that fragile and in need of protection?

Everyone likes it better when interactions are fun, interesting and positive, and it hurts when people make us angry or let us down. But that shouldn’t set us on a mission to purge our acquaintance list in the hopes of maximizing the good stuff. In the current environment where we’ve become accustomed to selecting and curating our music, our reading material and even our news, it’s tempting to slip into thinking it’s really possible to do the same with living human beings.

But deep down we know it just can’t be done and, if we think about it for a minute, we can see we wouldn’t like the boring, sterile and dystopian world that would come with it.