October 18, 2022 • 28 mins
What makes a good friend? We need them to be trustworthy, honest (but not too honest), loyal, a little judgmental, and a great listener. Barry explains what it takes to be this kind of friend, and why it takes courage to really listen.
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Speaker 1 (00:11):
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day University. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to episode eight of The Happiness Formula. I'm
your host, Mike Coscarelli. In the last few episodes, we've
been talking about wisdom in the workplace. Today we're getting personal,
exploring our roles as parents and friends. There's a saying
about friendships. A good friend is like a four leaf clover,
(00:56):
hard to find and lucky to have. But does anyone
actually know what makes a good friend and who's figured
out parenting well? Bear It tells you how wisdom can
be applied to improve your odds in both of those roles.
So let's get started. I want to talk about wisdom
(01:20):
and love. As Freud said, the secret to human happiness
is found in work and love. Work that is good
and relations to other people that are good. We need
loving relations to be happy, and what I'm going to
try to convince you of is that we need wisdom
(01:40):
to maintain loving relations with other people. I will discuss
wisdom and love in two domains. One is the domain
of friendship and the other is the domain of parenting.
What I will not talk about is the importance of
(02:03):
wisdom in romantic relationships, not because it's not important. It is,
but because I don't feel like I know enough about it.
So I'll concentrate on the stuff that I think I
understand better than romantic relationships. But here's my prediction. If
you're better at being friends and you're better at being parents,
(02:27):
chances are you will also be better at being lovers.
At least that's the hope. So let's start by talking
about friendship. Aristotle wrote about friendship and he identified three
different kinds of friendships that people have. One of them
(02:50):
is based on usefulness. We might these days call these
instrumental friendships, or the popular word nowadays is transactional friendships.
You scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. You give
me your business, I'll give you my business. We maintain
(03:13):
friendships like this, instrumental friendships or friendships of convenience because
someone else has something we want. They have a skill
we want to help us with a task. They have
a contact we want to help introduce us to the
right people. They have a certain amount of credibility or
(03:35):
status to write us a letter of recommendation, where they
have a resource to hire us for a job. So
this is one kind of friendship, and of course, for Aristotle,
it's a pretty crude and debased kind of friendship. The
second kind of friendship that Aristotle talked about is a
(03:59):
friendship that's based on shared pleasure. These kinds of friends
are people we have a good time with, people who
like going to the same restaurants, listening to the same music,
watching the same movies, and doing the same kinds of
exercise that we like to do. It's fun to be
with these people more because of what they like to
(04:23):
do than because of who or what they are. Increasingly,
I think we find as people move to retirement communities,
they are giving up lifelong friendships and replacing them with
friendships of people who basically like to do the same things. Now,
(04:49):
we all have friends who are useful, and we all
have friends who give us pleasure in shared activities. But
most of us want more from at least some of
our friendship than just usefulness or pleasure. We want what
(05:10):
you might call true friendships, whatever that word. True means
friendships where the purpose is in the rewards that come
from the friendship itself. Friendships for their own sake. This
kind of friendship, which Aristotle called character friendship, is a
(05:32):
relationship in which friends share common goals or purposes or projects.
Friends nurture each other. They seek to give one another
what is good, to help one another develop a sense
of who they are, to share their deepest joys and fears,
(05:53):
to cherish and support each other even when it is
neither pleasurable, say when a friend is sick or depressed,
nor useful. Friends like these don't worry about exploiting each
other or being exploited. Giving more than they receive isn't
(06:13):
a problem, since their objective in a friendship like this
is to give, to give what is good. We call
such friends best friends, or true friends or real friends.
You can't have very many of them are way too demanding,
(06:33):
but they're the kind of friendships we want to have. Now,
what does this kind of character friendship require. We have
to be trusting that the friend will have our backs,
will look out for us, and we have to be trustworthy.
(06:57):
We have to be honest, although as we've seen, honesty
is not unproblematic, and sometimes times kindness rather than honesty,
is called for. We have to have experience empathy, We
have to understand what it feels like to be going
through what our friend is going through. We have to
(07:18):
be a good listener, somebody who actually is attentive when
a friend is talking. I have to be thoughtful. We
need to know the other person well and to understand
what the other person is going through. We need kindness
and compassion. We need loyalty, and loyalty is a funny
(07:42):
thing because of course we're loyal to our friends. But
that's not to say that friendships like this can't end.
They can. There are limits to loyalty, and a point
is sometimes reached where it's kind of clear to all
parties that you have to go your separate ways. We want,
(08:04):
we need acceptance, shared values, and shared interests in a friendship.
You often hear young people complaining that someone is too judgmental,
and we want our friends not to be too judgmental.
But that's not to say that our friends can be
un judgmental, because sometimes if we are going down a
(08:29):
really bad, dangerous and self injurious path, it's going to
be there the judgment of our friends that stops us,
that saves us from going down that path. So that's
what it takes and we can ask for each of
these requirements, what is it, how do you know you haven't,
(08:49):
why is it so important to friendship? How do you
develop it? And in what ways is it problematic? And thus,
in what ways does it require wisdom or judgment? When
I used to teach a class on practical wisdom to
undergraduate students one year old students, the class began with
(09:11):
a discussion of friendship. And the reason we began with
the discussion of friendship is that everyone in the class
had friends, and everyone in the class and probably thought
themselves as something of an expert on what purpose friends
served and what your responsibilities were as a friend. What
(09:31):
does it mean to be a good listener? Can we
say that friends who are good listeners never interrupt? Don't interrupt?
That's the golden rule of listening. That was the first
reaction of several of our students. But wait just a second.
Suppose you don't understand what your friend is saying, or
(09:54):
suppose your friend is confused. Doesn't it whether you interrupt
depend on why they want you to listen, sup Is
they've got a real problem and they're trying to figure
it out. I'm not going to interrupt my friend in
the middle of a funny story. But if they want
me to listen to a problem and help them figure
(10:15):
out a solution, I've got to stop them when they're
not being clear. So figuring out how to listen is complicated.
We can think of several rules to follow. Don't interrupt,
try to make eye contact, make empathic statements like oh,
that's too bad, I really understand. Repeat back to the
(10:37):
person what you think they are saying in order to
confirm that you understand, and let them know you are
really listening carefully. These are little rules of thumb, and
in fact, in the nineteen eighties, the gigantic health plan
Kaiser Permanente developed what it called its four Habits model
(10:58):
to train thousands of physicians to listen better when they
interviewed patients, and it used work shops to train its
staff doctors and skills like how to get patients to
express their concerns, how to ask for patients ideas, how
to determine a patient's specific goal, how to demonstrate empathy.
(11:21):
But the thing to appreciate is that here you were training,
essentially training actors to perform a role. Because these physicians
didn't know their patients and so they had to act
as if they did. Whereas with genuine friends, best friends,
closest friends. Of course, we don't need to be following
(11:43):
a script because we are naturally inclined to do all
of these things. So good listening depends on who our
friend is, what sort of conversation we're having, what our
friend is struggling with, how she'll react to interruptions and questions,
(12:03):
and how we enter will react to what we sense,
what we hear, and what we see. To do this
kind of listening, rules are not enough. If the aim
of good listening is to come as close as we
can to understanding what our friend means and what he
(12:24):
or she is experiencing, then techniques for conveying empathy are
not enough. We have to have to actually be empathetic.
We have to have the capacity to read our friend
and the situation and to imagine what he is feeling,
(12:45):
and to put ourselves in the situation and imagine how
we would feel if we were in that situation. In addition,
as a friend, as a good listener, you need courage.
This may seem weird, but understanding what our friend really
(13:07):
means may expose us to fear and danger. We may
hear things we don't want to know, things that risk
changing how we feel about someone close to us, maybe
even change how we feel about ourselves and our own
way of being in the world. If a good friend
(13:30):
is someone we love because of what we share, then
her confusion or pain or doubt may raise similar feelings
inside of us. Really understanding what my friend is saying
may confront me with the need to examine and question
what I already believe. A good listener needs to be
(13:52):
willing to risk hering surprising or unpleasant things about his friend,
and also risk confronting his own fears and doubts without
shutting down or running from the conversation. Good listeners need
to be brave. As I say, it's not obvious or
(14:12):
intuitive that listening is a brave act, but really listening,
really putting yourself it's on the line by listening, is
an act of bravery, and it's what friends depend on
from their very good friends. Friends need to be honest,
(14:33):
but we've already seen that there are limits to honesty.
Sometimes a clearly moral trait like honesty can be an
obstacle to friendship because of the tradeoff that exists between
honesty and kindness. Friends need to be empathetic, but you
(14:56):
can be too empathetic. Uh. Jerome Grupman, the doctor we
already talked about in connection with the young cancer patient,
and described an example uh from his own past where
he felt too much for a patient. This was a
young man, very physically active athletic, who developed bone cancer
(15:24):
which was excruciating. So the man was, even with massive
pay medication, in agony much of the time, and groupman
would go and check on him on a daily basis
um and they developed a real relationship. He felt a
real attachment to this young guy, and when he came
(15:45):
in to talk to him and examine him, he basically
left him alone. He was the guy was in such
discomfort that he the groupman didn't want to move him around.
He wanted to keep his discomfort as minimal as he
possibly could. Well. One day, out of the blue, this
guy developed a raging fever hundred four hundred five. He
(16:11):
had become septic. He nearly died. The source of the fever,
the source of the infection was bed sores. The reason
for the bed sores is that groupman had not moved
him around when he came to see him because he
wanted to minimize this patient's discomfort, so just let him
(16:36):
lie there in whatever position he was able to tolerate,
rather than turning him on a side so that making
bed sores less likely. So he was so concerned with
the suffering of the patient that he made what he
subsequently realized was a terrible medical decision. And it was
(17:00):
a medical decision aimed at sparing suffering that almost caused
the patient. Is life, and so feeling too much is
a problem, just as not feeling is a problem. We
want our friends to be empathetic, but we need for them,
(17:24):
at least sometimes to be detached, to be detached enough
that they can see the situation wherein perhaps more clearly
than we can see it, and thus give us wise
counsel that we would be unable to provide ourselves. So,
to summarize true friendship what Aristotle called character, friendship requires
(17:54):
many virtues. Sometimes these virtues are intentional with one another,
and resolving this tension requires wisdom, requires judgment. This in
turn requires knowing the other person well enough to figure
out what the situation calls for. And so good friends
(18:18):
are wise friends. And this raises questions how many friends
of this kind can a person have When you think
about how demanding friendship is, at least as I've described it,
it's hard to imagine having more than a handful of
people in your life who are like this, and so
(18:41):
there's probably a limit on the number of true friendships
you can have in a life. Well, it's time for
a quick break, but when we come back. Barry explains
how our needs from friends change as we get older,
and what parents can learn from their child's imaginary friend. Yeah,
(19:18):
another question increasingly relevant in the age in which we live.
Can you have a long distance friend? Can you have
an online friend? What do we give up when we
replace face to face human interactions with text messaging or
(19:41):
eye chatting or even telephone conversations. I don't think we
know the answer to this. There is no formula or
recipe to what it requires to be a good friend,
and it's quite possible that friendship requires and means different
(20:03):
things to people at different points in their lives. What
we want from friends when we're middle aged, and what
we want from friends when we're young adults, and what
you want from friends when we're old and decrepit may
be quite different, and Similarly, what we can provide two
friends may be quite different at different stages in life.
(20:27):
Should friends be judgmental? I try to suggest that we
don't like the idea of the people we care about
judging us. On the other hand, we need the people
we care about judging us at least some of the time,
because we may have a harder time looking at our
(20:48):
lives in the right way than a friend does. And
so sometimes a friend needs to say, you know you're
drinking too much. Uh, you know you're burning the candle
at both ends. Uh. You know, I think you're giving
your teenage kid too much freedom. I think you need
(21:09):
to rein it in a little bit. Friends sometimes need
to tell us that they think we're doing something wrong,
and yet they need to tell us in a way
that doesn't threaten the safety we feel in revealing to
them the things that concern us. And so being judgmental
(21:30):
is important. But you have to find a way to
be judgmental in the right way. There's no formula. Friends
need to be flexible. What that means is that they
need to treat different people in different ways, and it
means they need to treat the same person in different
(21:51):
ways at different points in time, depending on what the
context requires. And that's why to be a good friend,
you must be a wise friend. Now I said I
wouldn't talk about romantic relationships, but it seems to me,
(22:13):
at the very least that what we want our friends
to be, and what we want our relations with our
friends to be, we also want our relations with our
romantic partners to be. We want our partners to be
our friends. We want them to be empathetic, we want
(22:35):
them to be good listeners. We want them to help
us be the best self we can be, and we
want to do the same for them. We want to
give at least as much as we get. And there's
laid on top of that, of course, is there, you know,
the sort of romantic dimension. But I think romance without
(22:57):
friendship is in a fundamental way incomplete. And so you
might say, romantic partners are just really, really really good
friends who happened to live together. Okay, So let us
turn then to a different aspect of social relations, a
(23:25):
different aspect of love, and this is the love that
parents have for their children. What does it take to
be a good parent. I will end this lecture with
a story, and then we'll take it up. In the
next lecture, the writer Adam Gopnik told a story about
(23:50):
his three year old daughter Olivia and her imaginary friend,
Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan and her
friend Charlie is already a sophistic aid in Manhattanite remember
Olivia's three. Charlie lives in an apartment on Madison Avenue
(24:12):
in Lexington. He dines on grilled chicken, fruit and water.
Having reached the age of seven and a half, he
feels or is thought to be old. Got Nick learns
more about Charlie Ravioli when Olivia talks about his doings
at the dinner table, or talks with Charlie on her
toy telephone, Ravioli, it's Olivia, It's Olivia, come and play, Okay,
(24:39):
call me by. Then she snaps her phone shut and
shakes her head. I always get his machine, she says,
or she'll say. I spoke to Ravioli today. Did you
have fun my wife? And I asked no, he was
busy working on a good day. She bumps into her
invisible friend and they go to a coffee shop. I
(25:01):
bumped into Charlie Ravioli, she announces, at dinner, we had coffee,
then he had to run. She size sometimes at her
inability to make their schedules mesh, but she accepts it
as inevitable, just the way life is. I bumped into
Charlie Ravioli today, she says. He was working. Then she
(25:21):
adds brightly, but we hopped into a taxi. What happened?
Then we asked, we grabbed lunch. She says. Her conversations
got Nick saw were drawn from those she heard from
her mother. Here's a mother conversation with a friend. How
(25:43):
is your day? Oh? You know. I tried to make
a day with Meg, but I couldn't find her, so
I left a message on our machine. Then I bumped
into Emily. After that meeting, I had in soho and
we had coffee and then she had to run. But
by then Meg had reached me on my cell and
we arranged. It seems odd to have an imaginary playmate
who's always too busy to play with you, Martha, my
(26:06):
wife said to me. Shouldn't your imaginary play maybe someone
you tell secrets to and sing songs with, And shouldn't
be somebody who's always hopping into taxis. Gopnick goes on
to reflect on how grown ups in New York have
become so busy and so obsessed with the language of
business that it dominates their conversation. Like Charlie Ravioli, we
(26:31):
hop into taxis and leave phone messages to avoid our acquaintances,
and find that we keep missing our friends. Got Nick
mentions one intimate who he lives just across the park from,
with whom he emails often, and who he's fortunate to
see two or three times a year. They are always busy.
(26:54):
I think Gopnick and his wife would have learned to
live happily with Charlie Ravioli had it not been for
the appearance of Lorie. She threw them bad lee At dinner.
Olivia had been mentioning a new personage almost as often
as she mentioned Ravioli. I talked to Laurie today, she'd begin,
(27:15):
She says, Ravioli's busy, or she would be closeted with
her play phone. Laurie tell Ravioli, I'm calling got Nick.
Pressed about who exactly Laurie was, Olivia shook her head.
She works for Ravioli, she said. Laurie says Ravioli is
too busy to play Olivia announced sadly one morning things
(27:40):
seemed to be deteriorating. Now now Ravioli was too busy
even to say he was too busy. So I hope
you found the story of Charlie Ravioli poignant and amusing.
The reason for including it was to make obvious to
(28:00):
you something that you probably already knew, which is our
children are always watching and listening to us, and we
likely teach them more when we're not trying to teach
them than we do when we are trying to teach them.
(28:23):
Thanks for listening. We hope this puts you on a
path to being a better friend. We'll see you next
time when Barry talks about how parents can be good listeners.
The Happiness Formula from One Day University is a production
of I Heart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're
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and check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history,
(28:47):
pop culture, true crime, and more.
Lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world history
examined and science explained. This is one day University. Welcome.
(00:36):
You're listening to episode eight of The Happiness Formula. I'm
your host, Mike Coscarelli. In the last few episodes, we've
been talking about wisdom in the workplace. Today we're getting personal,
exploring our roles as parents and friends. There's a saying
about friendships. A good friend is like a four leaf clover,
(00:56):
hard to find and lucky to have. But does anyone
actually know what makes a good friend and who's figured
out parenting well? Bear It tells you how wisdom can
be applied to improve your odds in both of those roles.
So let's get started. I want to talk about wisdom
(01:20):
and love. As Freud said, the secret to human happiness
is found in work and love. Work that is good
and relations to other people that are good. We need
loving relations to be happy, and what I'm going to
try to convince you of is that we need wisdom
(01:40):
to maintain loving relations with other people. I will discuss
wisdom and love in two domains. One is the domain
of friendship and the other is the domain of parenting.
What I will not talk about is the importance of
(02:03):
wisdom in romantic relationships, not because it's not important. It is,
but because I don't feel like I know enough about it.
So I'll concentrate on the stuff that I think I
understand better than romantic relationships. But here's my prediction. If
you're better at being friends and you're better at being parents,
(02:27):
chances are you will also be better at being lovers.
At least that's the hope. So let's start by talking
about friendship. Aristotle wrote about friendship and he identified three
different kinds of friendships that people have. One of them
(02:50):
is based on usefulness. We might these days call these
instrumental friendships, or the popular word nowadays is transactional friendships.
You scratch my back, I'll scratch your back. You give
me your business, I'll give you my business. We maintain
(03:13):
friendships like this, instrumental friendships or friendships of convenience because
someone else has something we want. They have a skill
we want to help us with a task. They have
a contact we want to help introduce us to the
right people. They have a certain amount of credibility or
(03:35):
status to write us a letter of recommendation, where they
have a resource to hire us for a job. So
this is one kind of friendship, and of course, for Aristotle,
it's a pretty crude and debased kind of friendship. The
second kind of friendship that Aristotle talked about is a
(03:59):
friendship that's based on shared pleasure. These kinds of friends
are people we have a good time with, people who
like going to the same restaurants, listening to the same music,
watching the same movies, and doing the same kinds of
exercise that we like to do. It's fun to be
with these people more because of what they like to
(04:23):
do than because of who or what they are. Increasingly,
I think we find as people move to retirement communities,
they are giving up lifelong friendships and replacing them with
friendships of people who basically like to do the same things. Now,
(04:49):
we all have friends who are useful, and we all
have friends who give us pleasure in shared activities. But
most of us want more from at least some of
our friendship than just usefulness or pleasure. We want what
(05:10):
you might call true friendships, whatever that word. True means
friendships where the purpose is in the rewards that come
from the friendship itself. Friendships for their own sake. This
kind of friendship, which Aristotle called character friendship, is a
(05:32):
relationship in which friends share common goals or purposes or projects.
Friends nurture each other. They seek to give one another
what is good, to help one another develop a sense
of who they are, to share their deepest joys and fears,
(05:53):
to cherish and support each other even when it is
neither pleasurable, say when a friend is sick or depressed,
nor useful. Friends like these don't worry about exploiting each
other or being exploited. Giving more than they receive isn't
(06:13):
a problem, since their objective in a friendship like this
is to give, to give what is good. We call
such friends best friends, or true friends or real friends.
You can't have very many of them are way too demanding,
(06:33):
but they're the kind of friendships we want to have. Now,
what does this kind of character friendship require. We have
to be trusting that the friend will have our backs,
will look out for us, and we have to be trustworthy.
(06:57):
We have to be honest, although as we've seen, honesty
is not unproblematic, and sometimes times kindness rather than honesty,
is called for. We have to have experience empathy, We
have to understand what it feels like to be going
through what our friend is going through. We have to
(07:18):
be a good listener, somebody who actually is attentive when
a friend is talking. I have to be thoughtful. We
need to know the other person well and to understand
what the other person is going through. We need kindness
and compassion. We need loyalty, and loyalty is a funny
(07:42):
thing because of course we're loyal to our friends. But
that's not to say that friendships like this can't end.
They can. There are limits to loyalty, and a point
is sometimes reached where it's kind of clear to all
parties that you have to go your separate ways. We want,
(08:04):
we need acceptance, shared values, and shared interests in a friendship.
You often hear young people complaining that someone is too judgmental,
and we want our friends not to be too judgmental.
But that's not to say that our friends can be
un judgmental, because sometimes if we are going down a
(08:29):
really bad, dangerous and self injurious path, it's going to
be there the judgment of our friends that stops us,
that saves us from going down that path. So that's
what it takes and we can ask for each of
these requirements, what is it, how do you know you haven't,
(08:49):
why is it so important to friendship? How do you
develop it? And in what ways is it problematic? And thus,
in what ways does it require wisdom or judgment? When
I used to teach a class on practical wisdom to
undergraduate students one year old students, the class began with
(09:11):
a discussion of friendship. And the reason we began with
the discussion of friendship is that everyone in the class
had friends, and everyone in the class and probably thought
themselves as something of an expert on what purpose friends
served and what your responsibilities were as a friend. What
(09:31):
does it mean to be a good listener? Can we
say that friends who are good listeners never interrupt? Don't interrupt?
That's the golden rule of listening. That was the first
reaction of several of our students. But wait just a second.
Suppose you don't understand what your friend is saying, or
(09:54):
suppose your friend is confused. Doesn't it whether you interrupt
depend on why they want you to listen, sup Is
they've got a real problem and they're trying to figure
it out. I'm not going to interrupt my friend in
the middle of a funny story. But if they want
me to listen to a problem and help them figure
(10:15):
out a solution, I've got to stop them when they're
not being clear. So figuring out how to listen is complicated.
We can think of several rules to follow. Don't interrupt,
try to make eye contact, make empathic statements like oh,
that's too bad, I really understand. Repeat back to the
(10:37):
person what you think they are saying in order to
confirm that you understand, and let them know you are
really listening carefully. These are little rules of thumb, and
in fact, in the nineteen eighties, the gigantic health plan
Kaiser Permanente developed what it called its four Habits model
(10:58):
to train thousands of physicians to listen better when they
interviewed patients, and it used work shops to train its
staff doctors and skills like how to get patients to
express their concerns, how to ask for patients ideas, how
to determine a patient's specific goal, how to demonstrate empathy.
(11:21):
But the thing to appreciate is that here you were training,
essentially training actors to perform a role. Because these physicians
didn't know their patients and so they had to act
as if they did. Whereas with genuine friends, best friends,
closest friends. Of course, we don't need to be following
(11:43):
a script because we are naturally inclined to do all
of these things. So good listening depends on who our
friend is, what sort of conversation we're having, what our
friend is struggling with, how she'll react to interruptions and questions,
(12:03):
and how we enter will react to what we sense,
what we hear, and what we see. To do this
kind of listening, rules are not enough. If the aim
of good listening is to come as close as we
can to understanding what our friend means and what he
(12:24):
or she is experiencing, then techniques for conveying empathy are
not enough. We have to have to actually be empathetic.
We have to have the capacity to read our friend
and the situation and to imagine what he is feeling,
(12:45):
and to put ourselves in the situation and imagine how
we would feel if we were in that situation. In addition,
as a friend, as a good listener, you need courage.
This may seem weird, but understanding what our friend really
(13:07):
means may expose us to fear and danger. We may
hear things we don't want to know, things that risk
changing how we feel about someone close to us, maybe
even change how we feel about ourselves and our own
way of being in the world. If a good friend
(13:30):
is someone we love because of what we share, then
her confusion or pain or doubt may raise similar feelings
inside of us. Really understanding what my friend is saying
may confront me with the need to examine and question
what I already believe. A good listener needs to be
(13:52):
willing to risk hering surprising or unpleasant things about his friend,
and also risk confronting his own fears and doubts without
shutting down or running from the conversation. Good listeners need
to be brave. As I say, it's not obvious or
(14:12):
intuitive that listening is a brave act, but really listening,
really putting yourself it's on the line by listening, is
an act of bravery, and it's what friends depend on
from their very good friends. Friends need to be honest,
(14:33):
but we've already seen that there are limits to honesty.
Sometimes a clearly moral trait like honesty can be an
obstacle to friendship because of the tradeoff that exists between
honesty and kindness. Friends need to be empathetic, but you
(14:56):
can be too empathetic. Uh. Jerome Grupman, the doctor we
already talked about in connection with the young cancer patient,
and described an example uh from his own past where
he felt too much for a patient. This was a
young man, very physically active athletic, who developed bone cancer
(15:24):
which was excruciating. So the man was, even with massive
pay medication, in agony much of the time, and groupman
would go and check on him on a daily basis
um and they developed a real relationship. He felt a
real attachment to this young guy, and when he came
(15:45):
in to talk to him and examine him, he basically
left him alone. He was the guy was in such
discomfort that he the groupman didn't want to move him around.
He wanted to keep his discomfort as minimal as he
possibly could. Well. One day, out of the blue, this
guy developed a raging fever hundred four hundred five. He
(16:11):
had become septic. He nearly died. The source of the fever,
the source of the infection was bed sores. The reason
for the bed sores is that groupman had not moved
him around when he came to see him because he
wanted to minimize this patient's discomfort, so just let him
(16:36):
lie there in whatever position he was able to tolerate,
rather than turning him on a side so that making
bed sores less likely. So he was so concerned with
the suffering of the patient that he made what he
subsequently realized was a terrible medical decision. And it was
(17:00):
a medical decision aimed at sparing suffering that almost caused
the patient. Is life, and so feeling too much is
a problem, just as not feeling is a problem. We
want our friends to be empathetic, but we need for them,
(17:24):
at least sometimes to be detached, to be detached enough
that they can see the situation wherein perhaps more clearly
than we can see it, and thus give us wise
counsel that we would be unable to provide ourselves. So,
to summarize true friendship what Aristotle called character, friendship requires
(17:54):
many virtues. Sometimes these virtues are intentional with one another,
and resolving this tension requires wisdom, requires judgment. This in
turn requires knowing the other person well enough to figure
out what the situation calls for. And so good friends
(18:18):
are wise friends. And this raises questions how many friends
of this kind can a person have When you think
about how demanding friendship is, at least as I've described it,
it's hard to imagine having more than a handful of
people in your life who are like this, and so
(18:41):
there's probably a limit on the number of true friendships
you can have in a life. Well, it's time for
a quick break, but when we come back. Barry explains
how our needs from friends change as we get older,
and what parents can learn from their child's imaginary friend. Yeah,
(19:18):
another question increasingly relevant in the age in which we live.
Can you have a long distance friend? Can you have
an online friend? What do we give up when we
replace face to face human interactions with text messaging or
(19:41):
eye chatting or even telephone conversations. I don't think we
know the answer to this. There is no formula or
recipe to what it requires to be a good friend,
and it's quite possible that friendship requires and means different
(20:03):
things to people at different points in their lives. What
we want from friends when we're middle aged, and what
we want from friends when we're young adults, and what
you want from friends when we're old and decrepit may
be quite different, and Similarly, what we can provide two
friends may be quite different at different stages in life.
(20:27):
Should friends be judgmental? I try to suggest that we
don't like the idea of the people we care about
judging us. On the other hand, we need the people
we care about judging us at least some of the time,
because we may have a harder time looking at our
(20:48):
lives in the right way than a friend does. And
so sometimes a friend needs to say, you know you're
drinking too much. Uh, you know you're burning the candle
at both ends. Uh. You know, I think you're giving
your teenage kid too much freedom. I think you need
(21:09):
to rein it in a little bit. Friends sometimes need
to tell us that they think we're doing something wrong,
and yet they need to tell us in a way
that doesn't threaten the safety we feel in revealing to
them the things that concern us. And so being judgmental
(21:30):
is important. But you have to find a way to
be judgmental in the right way. There's no formula. Friends
need to be flexible. What that means is that they
need to treat different people in different ways, and it
means they need to treat the same person in different
(21:51):
ways at different points in time, depending on what the
context requires. And that's why to be a good friend,
you must be a wise friend. Now I said I
wouldn't talk about romantic relationships, but it seems to me,
(22:13):
at the very least that what we want our friends
to be, and what we want our relations with our
friends to be, we also want our relations with our
romantic partners to be. We want our partners to be
our friends. We want them to be empathetic, we want
(22:35):
them to be good listeners. We want them to help
us be the best self we can be, and we
want to do the same for them. We want to
give at least as much as we get. And there's
laid on top of that, of course, is there, you know,
the sort of romantic dimension. But I think romance without
(22:57):
friendship is in a fundamental way incomplete. And so you
might say, romantic partners are just really, really really good
friends who happened to live together. Okay, So let us
turn then to a different aspect of social relations, a
(23:25):
different aspect of love, and this is the love that
parents have for their children. What does it take to
be a good parent. I will end this lecture with
a story, and then we'll take it up. In the
next lecture, the writer Adam Gopnik told a story about
(23:50):
his three year old daughter Olivia and her imaginary friend,
Charlie Ravioli. Olivia is growing up in Manhattan and her
friend Charlie is already a sophistic aid in Manhattanite remember
Olivia's three. Charlie lives in an apartment on Madison Avenue
(24:12):
in Lexington. He dines on grilled chicken, fruit and water.
Having reached the age of seven and a half, he
feels or is thought to be old. Got Nick learns
more about Charlie Ravioli when Olivia talks about his doings
at the dinner table, or talks with Charlie on her
toy telephone, Ravioli, it's Olivia, It's Olivia, come and play, Okay,
(24:39):
call me by. Then she snaps her phone shut and
shakes her head. I always get his machine, she says,
or she'll say. I spoke to Ravioli today. Did you
have fun my wife? And I asked no, he was
busy working on a good day. She bumps into her
invisible friend and they go to a coffee shop. I
(25:01):
bumped into Charlie Ravioli, she announces, at dinner, we had coffee,
then he had to run. She size sometimes at her
inability to make their schedules mesh, but she accepts it
as inevitable, just the way life is. I bumped into
Charlie Ravioli today, she says. He was working. Then she
(25:21):
adds brightly, but we hopped into a taxi. What happened?
Then we asked, we grabbed lunch. She says. Her conversations
got Nick saw were drawn from those she heard from
her mother. Here's a mother conversation with a friend. How
(25:43):
is your day? Oh? You know. I tried to make
a day with Meg, but I couldn't find her, so
I left a message on our machine. Then I bumped
into Emily. After that meeting, I had in soho and
we had coffee and then she had to run. But
by then Meg had reached me on my cell and
we arranged. It seems odd to have an imaginary playmate
who's always too busy to play with you, Martha, my
(26:06):
wife said to me. Shouldn't your imaginary play maybe someone
you tell secrets to and sing songs with, And shouldn't
be somebody who's always hopping into taxis. Gopnick goes on
to reflect on how grown ups in New York have
become so busy and so obsessed with the language of
business that it dominates their conversation. Like Charlie Ravioli, we
(26:31):
hop into taxis and leave phone messages to avoid our acquaintances,
and find that we keep missing our friends. Got Nick
mentions one intimate who he lives just across the park from,
with whom he emails often, and who he's fortunate to
see two or three times a year. They are always busy.
(26:54):
I think Gopnick and his wife would have learned to
live happily with Charlie Ravioli had it not been for
the appearance of Lorie. She threw them bad lee At dinner.
Olivia had been mentioning a new personage almost as often
as she mentioned Ravioli. I talked to Laurie today, she'd begin,
(27:15):
She says, Ravioli's busy, or she would be closeted with
her play phone. Laurie tell Ravioli, I'm calling got Nick.
Pressed about who exactly Laurie was, Olivia shook her head.
She works for Ravioli, she said. Laurie says Ravioli is
too busy to play Olivia announced sadly one morning things
(27:40):
seemed to be deteriorating. Now now Ravioli was too busy
even to say he was too busy. So I hope
you found the story of Charlie Ravioli poignant and amusing.
The reason for including it was to make obvious to
(28:00):
you something that you probably already knew, which is our
children are always watching and listening to us, and we
likely teach them more when we're not trying to teach
them than we do when we are trying to teach them.
(28:23):
Thanks for listening. We hope this puts you on a
path to being a better friend. We'll see you next
time when Barry talks about how parents can be good listeners.
The Happiness Formula from One Day University is a production
of I Heart Podcasts and School of Humans. If you're
enjoying the show, leave a review in your favorite podcast app,
and check out the Curiosity Audio Network for podcasts covering history,
(28:47):
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