Article XXVIII — What’s a Real Friend? —  Dr. Jordan B. Peterson

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Here’s how you know if someone is your friend.

You can tell them bad news and they’ll listen. They won’t tell you why, you know, you’re stupid and why that thing happened to you and how something worse happened to them once, and derail the whole conversation. You can actually tell them bad news and they’ll listen.

So that’s a good thing, and then, this is a weirder thing: you can tell them good news and they’ll help you celebrate, and that’s a really good way of deciding who you should have around you, because if you have someone around you, something good happens to you and you are kind of afraid to even admit it because, “God, something good happened to you.” It’s like you let that be known and it’ll certainly be taken away.

So, you know, you come out and you sort of tell someone half-heartedly that something good happened to you, and they give you a whack and then talk about, you know, the great thing that happened to them 3 years ago, or worse, the great thing that happened to someone that they knew 3 years ago.

Go away from that person. They’re not helpful to you, and they are not helpful to themselves either. You got to think about this, you ought to surround yourself with people who want the best for the best part of you. You can hang around weasels and losers who are trying to pull you down, to justify the fact that they’re spiraling downhill as well, and the upside of that is that you don’t have to have any responsibility, you can all whine about how wretched life is, you know, so that’s pretty attractive, but I would say it’s also a bad medium to long-term plan, and so it’s acceptable and desirable to try to surround yourself with people who are facilitating your development.

You might say, “Well, I’ve got people around, I know them well, they’re not doing that well, and they don’t fit into that category.” It’s like… What’s your point? What are you going to do with it exactly?

If they’ll listen and cooperate with you and move towards a better future, great.

If they don’t pay any attention and they keep doing the same thing over and over and they’re not going anywhere, and it’s painful, then maybe the proper thing to do is say:

“You just have your misery, I’ll go off and have my life, and maybe you’ll wake up at some point in the future and think that that’s a better way of being.” Because just putting up with this, they call that “Enabling,” right? You put up with that sort of behaviour, you are providing tacit consent for it and even tacit approval.

It’s a bad idea. You have, I would say, both the right and the responsibility to surround yourself with people who are good for the best part of you.