Friendship

In conducting my affairs, I incessantly pose questions to justify my course of action. "What exactly am I doing?" "Why am I doing this?" "Do the projected benefits of this outweigh the potential costs?" "How does this relate to the scheme of my worldview?" In recent months, I've found myself forcing like questions onto the matter of friendship. What is friendship? Are the people around me friends? Why am I engaging in this social bondage to them? What is the benefit? Is this incongruent with my morality?

To complicate the matter, no person or encyclopedic source can provide me with clear and definite criteria for friendship. I myself have no definitive criteria; the people around me who call themselves my friends and vice versa are permitted the position only out of a habitual convenience. They have been there for so long and so devoutly that I've simply lacked the motivation and rhetoric to discharge them, yet I am faced with a growing uneasiness with my inability to justify their rank in my life in practical or principle terms. I have a gnawing suspicion that they do not belong there.

I might suppose, for simplicity, that friendship is merely a mutually elevated regard between two or more people based on some personal inclination. Practices and policies often attributed to friendship such as openness and emotional support flow from this elevated regard. This leaves me with the question of justifying my own partaking in this social practice. Is there a reason for me to regard these people exceptionally? Is it because they themselves are of exceptional merit? Is it because they are exceptionally important to my affairs?

As in any interaction, there is ideally the demand for beneficial exchange. I am expected to give something that they desire in exchange for something that I desire. Friendship doesn't normally seem to follow this framework, however, because things are seemingly expected to be given free of return. This is categorically unacceptable by me. How can I be demanded to sacrifice my effort and resources without any benefit in return? Am I a sacrifice upon the altar of "friendship," merely a transitional means to their ends? It would seem so, as they unspokenly expect me to give unto them what they need without my explicit want for a return, and returns are something that I do not acquire from them. Their company does me little benefit; their resources are irrelevant to my needs; I have all of the emotional support I need in myself; they offer feelings of social adequacy and acceptance, but I've never needed these things before, and cannot glean what use they are to me now. It would seem that I gain nothing substantial from them.

There is perhaps another justification of friendship. Perhaps in their characters there are virtues and values that I hold in high regard, and because of that, I may desire to see them be made to prosper. If I value certain principles and see those principles reflected in the lives and philosophies of like minded people, then they themselves must hold elevated value to me, and it would be a tribute to the framework of my own principles to see them blessed with my company and loyalty. Is there any such reflection of myself in my friends today? There is not. None of my perspectives or values are akin to theirs. In most of my friends, there is never any agreement between our experiences, perspectives or morality.

Having reflected on this, I conclude that there is no justification for me to continue this social bondage with any of them.