Friendly Fires

Times change… People change... We change… What happens when your old friends are no longer the type of people you care to associate with?

Now I’m not saying that your former friends have pulled a heel turn, started smoking crack and kidnapping people for ransom. No, it’s the little things; the lifestyle choices they’ve made that don’t mesh with yours: The crowds they choose to hang with. Their manner of speech. The way they text (I mean, if u hd a frnd txtin u lyk dis mst of d tym, I dnt thnk ud wnt dem 2 b txtn u oftn). It’s not their fault. They just chose to live life a little differently. But diversity brings discrimination, whether we want to admit it or not. They’re different from you and you’re different from them. In fact, they may find you just as incompatible/unappealing as you find them. Some of them probably can’t wait to be rid of you. Now it’s not a question of who can’t stand who, and who the bad guy here is. The fact remains that from your perspective, you guys just don’t mix anymore. And, from a purely economical point of view, it makes no sense for you to keep associating with these fellows.

It takes away your time, and it takes away your energy; the effort you expend in an attempt to be social is no mean feat. You send the occasional “what’s good?” message of facebook, and if you ever see them at a social ensemble, you try to hold a conversation with them for more than a minute. But they don’t say anything of worth, at least not to you anyway. To someone else, their words may be glistening, golden baubles of immeasurable wisdom and rapturous enlightenment. To you, however, its crap; Pure, unadulterated cow dung. And it isn’t even the good kind of shit. If you spread that dung on a field you wouldn’t grow nuthin. Seeing them for more than just a minute is just, for lack of a better phrase, a waste of life.

So, what do we do with these “friends”. Some folk say “just ditch em.” A crude but effective solution. Just bail out of the friendship wagon. Downgrade dem fools from ‘friend’ to ‘associate’. Pretty much ignore their existences, perhaps exchanging a few pleasantries when you walk past each other. Just perhaps. Its not much different from what you already do. Heck, you hardly see them as it is, right?

Now I’m not saying you become their enemies (whenever I say that word, the Nigerian intonation of it always comes to mind. Naija folks know what I mean. There’s enemies, and then there’s ENEMIES. But I digress). Your social interactions with these people, or what semblance of them you have, remain almost completely the same. The only thing that changes is your mentality. These people no longer hold a significant portion of your mind-space. A trifling thing, you might think, but mind-space is nigh invaluable. It’s the base for conformity, groupthink and coalescence. It’s how movements get started; how revolutions begin: by allowing someone to take a share of your mind. It’s all about Cathexis; the investment of emotions into an object. When you attribute significance to something or someone, you feel more strongly towards them, and both positive and negative emotions projected towards the object are heightened.

If you attribute “friendship” to a party, you are more likely to agree with them, empathize with them and see things from their point of view. So if you look at things from the perspective of a guy who spits nothing but bullshit, what do you think you’re gonna see? That’s right; bullshit. And I don’t know about you, but I’m not one for having bullshit on my mental windscreen. It obstructs my view; and when cruising down the road of life, I prefer to be able to see my goals. If I have to step out of my cognitive conveyor to clean bullshit off the glass every two seconds, my goals will be a long time coming. It’s probably best to have those shit-spinners take a flying leap. Good riddance to bad rubbish and all that stuff.

But, on the flip side, closing off your mind to these people also means you forego seeing a lot of things, though it’s probably going to be mostly (yes, you guessed it) bullshit. There’s a saying that goes “even in a pile of pebbles, one can find a pearl.” It might only be a minute chance, but as long as that chance isn’t zero percent, you just may be able to pick out something valuable from the lives of these people. Maybe all that cow dung isn’t impotent after all. Besides, you never know when you’ll need them for one thing or another, so while it’s tempting to burn bridges, you may want to keep these guys around. Just in case. The downside is that you never know if you’ll ever actually need these people, or if you’ll ever find that valuable pearl. You may just end up having dung flung in your face for the rest of your life.

At the end of the day, I remain at a quandary when it comes to these folks. As I said before, I’m not perfect, and these feelings of social disconnect may be mutual. Perhaps some people may have been trying to get rid of me for the past couple of years but my insistence on social interaction must have been dampening their efforts. If that’s so, then I apologize to those people from the bottom of my heart, for I have been a bullshit slinger; a relentless cow dung flinger. But for those who have been throwing the crap in my face, I could go down the Usher route and let it burn, or I could go with Journey and don’t stop believing. Neither solution has proven itself absolute; after all, each case is unique, and no two friends are alike. So I guess it’s impossible to generalize, and till I examine each case individually, I’ll do a Johnny Cash, and walk the line.