“Without friends, no
one would want to live, even if he had all other goods.”- Aristotle:
“What
is a friend? A single soul dwelling in two bodies." Answered Aristotle, who wrote extensively about the concept and
importance of true friendship. Friendship it is said is the greatest source of
good health. It is the most valued relation after the family and often placed
higher than family. In fact the closest family relationships are measured in
terms of friendship. Couples aspire to be best friends, and many parents strive to befriend their
children. Friendship is vital for our wellbeing. Research points out
that if your best friend eats healthily, you are five times more likely to have
a healthy diet yourself. Married people say friendship is more than five times
as important as physical intimacy within marriage. If you have a “best friend
at work”, you are seven times more likely to feel engaged in your job. It may sound surprising, but our social life is more important for longevity than our healthy diet and exercise.
Who your friends are is
correlated to what kind of lifestyle you
have. Good friends have a potent beneficial impact on your health, more than the
Gym, and your gluten-free, sugar-free, vegan protein shakes and diet.
In a world of hyper-connectivity driven by technology, what is happening to true friendship? Is it on the decline? Is true
friendship really possible? Has social media changed the definition of
friendship & intimacy forever? Is it promoting the kind of meaningful
existence that Aristotle was seeking and advocating?
Recently I began to seek answers to these questions when I went
through a bout of depression. Being a person who expresses my emotions through
writings, I ended up posting a series of sad & melancholic poetry on my
Time line one after the other. Within minutes I was flooded with messages,
phone calls, mails and offers of help, suggestions and invites from my
friends. What surprised me that these offers not only came from my old and cherished friends, but from some of my new found friends whom I had befriended on
social media and had never met. Being a person who strongly believes in face to face communication, I was taken by surprise at such a response. I realized
that in this increasingly disconnected ‘flat’ world as per American journalist
Thomas Friedman, relationships are
actually thriving!
To
overcome my depression, boredom and to rejuvenate myself, I took
a trip on my own to visit some of my cherished friends in three different
states of India. During my travel, I
realized that every time my flight landed, instead of scrambling like others to
get my hand baggage from the overhead storage, I would be busy sending message
of ‘landed safely’ to several worried
friends and family on my phone and also to save my phone from the deluge of messages asking me ‘have you reached safely?’ This
made me realise, how blessed I was to have so many people keeping me in my
prayers for safe journey. Because despite of erratic weather, it is easier
to have faith in a flying machine, but increasingly difficult to have faith in
a pilot’s mental health. And prayers have the power to heal mental health too!
Another thing that struck me was that, While I enjoyed immensely
the company of my treasured friends (some of whom I met after years), I was
constantly on my phone with a set of friends whom, either I had befriended very
recently, or have met on social media and has never even seem them. Although in
my middle age, I still make friends with considerable ease. The era of digital
communication has helped and changed the face of friendship to a great extent.
My bouquet of friends is in all hues and colours. I have Twitter friends,
Facebook friends and WhatsApp friends apart from my work friends, childhood
friends, Mohalla friends, Alumini friends, friends of my children and those of
my husband. My son who is often shocked and alarmed at the lightening speed
with which I make friends seems to be perpetually worried at the risks I take
by meeting my social media friends on and off. I can never forget the horror on
my adolescent son’s face one day, when I told him that I was going to meet a
twitter friend over a cup of coffee. He complained with shock and anger in his
voice, and said, “What? I cannot believe you Amma? All my life you have taught
me not to talk to strangers and here you are, going to meet your twitter
friend?” Caught on the wrong foot, I immediately reasoned him out with the
wealth of my wisdom and my greying hair
and of course took refuge behind my loving husband who was accompanying me for
a late night coffee sojourn. Being a
Scorpio, I am blessed me with a rare insight at choosing friends. In a glance I decide the worth of a person and
if I need to further engage with him/her, I get an immediate feeling - whether
someone is likely to be a friend or foe. Rarely has my instincts betrayed me.
On the social media I look for discourse markers and linguistic abilities,
background and authenticity, to decide if I can friend a person or not. Thanks to
my research in Nonverbal communication, these aspects have always protected me
against wrong choice.
Writers have always fascinated me. I fall in
love with Poets instantly. This weakness of mine has accelerated the speed with
which I make friends on social media
Anyone who writes well is followed by me and I often interact with them
on regular basis, and if they write humour, I make sure I know them closely. These
thinkers, change makers and satirist fuel my imagination, spice up my
skepticism and charge my energies to bring in change through words. It
is indeed a delightful experience to read posts from such people about
some issue that has been bothering me, in a perfectly crafted, agonizing, complaining post laced
with Pun, humour and hope, all in one. This make me think "Oh well he/she thinks like me?" and similarity of thought connects me with them.
As a child I had few ‘Pen friends’ as they were called during the
70s. Magazines in those days regularly published addresses of people from around the world,
who were interested in being pen friends. The communication happened through
letters only as there was not much possibility of meeting or talking to them
in real life thanks to scarce tele-density and near non-existent luxury/
holiday travel. Internet friendship somehow provided the same taste to me. In
today’s world relationships
that travel through the internet and navigate in non digital world or get
stuckup somewhere in between have certain amount of weirdness in them. Since
there is a lot of stigma attached to online friendship, I am amazed at the amount of space virtual interaction
in relationships have taken over in this
age of social media. Of course the suspicion of the semi anonymous nature of
the net has its risks, but with little experience and age one can decipher
easily between the real and the fake. The internet represents the broadening of
the spectrum of relationships. I have several WhatsApp friends whom I have
never met in real life and may not meet ever in future, but they are as good as
my other face to face friends; Compassionate, caring & funny (sense of
humour is a must in my friends). The merit of these friendships lies in their
mutual likes and respect. Friendship now develops in digital and physical
realms, often crossing freely between the two. It is thriving in this 24x7
wired world, thanks to the low cost maintenance of friendship, you only require
a smart phone and a data pack. Although the online
friends are qualitatively different than your in-person friends, they shape you
nevertheless. They can also be your source of life support. They can make you miserable too, especially
if you get caught in the “friendship paradox” (the research which says that
most people on Facebook have fewer friend). But let this thought not keep you
away from making good friends who have similar thoughts, taste & sentiments
as you.
In
today’s time-starved, stressful, highly mobile society, friendship has never
been more necessary. It is believed that loneliness and isolation contribute to
more deaths than cancer. Nor have our standards of what constitutes true
intimacy in friendship been higher. But the essence of friendship—frequent,
lengthy face-to-face conversations—has grown ever more elusive. Hence If we
cultivate friendship (online and offline) it can lift some of the burden from
our apparently unhappy and isolated
selves. Authentic friendship has
two faces- a therapeutic one, which constitutes listening,
affirmation, and unconditional support. The other is the "feminine" side
of friendship that values communication, emotional expressiveness, closeness,
the sharing of feelings, and intimate self-disclosure. Grab any relationship that fulfills these essence of friendships. Sometimes people hundreds of miles away can
make you feel better than the ones near you.
As I recommend and suggest in investing in friendship, there
are cautions to be considered too. Friendship thrives
on mutual revelations which are concealed from the rest of the world, it flourishes
within the boundaries of privacy. The idea of public friendship sounds like an
oxymoron, hence apply these long researched notions of friendship to your
social networking platforms. It should give you a sense of ‘community’
which is often missing in hollow of the social networking. Its important that
we maintain a balance of offline friends and connection with long lost ones
through online networks. Use your Whats App and private messaging more often than
your wall posts. So how do we know if we are having a cushion of meaningful
social relationships around us? The
answer to this question may not be easy, but to be sure ask yourself: Outside of your family, how many
people would you be willing to call in the middle of the night if you needed
help, and how many of them would be willing to get out of bed and come to rescue you? And: What
if you had a great news to share, Who would you call? If you don’t have at
least two people (apart from family) on both of your lists, perhaps you should
take more seriously the role of friendship or social relationships in your
life. If you pick the right friends, they could play a crucial role in your
longevity. Trust me, I returned happy, strong & optimistic after visiting
my friends.
