Flex and Frooms Flex and Frooms. This is the Flex and Frooms catch up podcast.
It is Flex and Frooms on Cato. One of my favorite things to do here is pose a question that we sometimes will answer. But if you know how to read between the lines of chaos and humor, you'll see that everything we say is in fact apt and can be applied for your everyday life.
And is also a joke.
Never, though, no, never, do you think you should be someone's friend out of charity. Oh imagine if someone lonely considers you a close friend purely by proximity, should you stay in their life even if it's not quote unquote serving you. I've got a lot to say about consolation prize friendships, but this comes from the New York Times.
They've got a column.
Called The Ethicist, where people ask moral and ethical questions to the person who writes the column, and they answer it. So, Arita says, a person I've known for many years considers me a friend, even a good friend. Although I pretend to like him, spending time with him is seldom and jo and is actually often quite difficult. He is, I believe,
profoundly depressed and has very few friends. If any He is invariably negative, and when questioned about seeming unhappy, is unwilling to consider any different perspectives, possible changes, or therapy down This person contacts me every couple of months to get together, and I put it off. Eventually I respond out of sympathy and guilt, and when I see him, I'm not gushingly friendly, but I try to be supportive and and make him feel both liked and appreciated, and
I believe he finds me entertaining. In short, he seems to have a good time. He has remarked that I'm always direct and honest about my feelings. I do normally detest phoniness and have harsh feelings about two people in my own life who profess to be close, loving friends while secretly trashing me behind my back. So I feel
for this person and would like to help him. But is friendliness a charitable act if it's insincere when someone is lonely and depressed, is it better to be a phony friend or not a friend at all?
This is a wild one for.
Me, because I just feel in my heart of hearts that being an active friend, like a proper friend, not a party friend, an acquaintance, a work friend, you know someone who's involved. It requires an emotional transfer that I don't think should be faked. I used to feel as though what someone got out of a friendship and what you gave didn't have to be equal, even in the
same vein, because people have different needs or whatever. But the more that I invest in people, it becomes clear to me that at a baseline, we should have the same understanding what this friendship is doing for both of us, and we should like endeavor to keep that up. So, for example, that's why I don't think you should always transition party friends, because we should endeavor to ensure that.
At the party this is popping.
But when you start to transition it into like a day to day friendship, we're bringing like unresolved ideals from one dynamic into another. This one, though, is getting me because I remember having a friend who would only ever call on me when they had something to like complain about, which is fine, I love it.
It's like juicy, I love gossip.
However, in contrast with that, the type of friend who always had a new friend just couldn't keep new friends, could never see that they were the issue. Extremely judgmental extremely critical, extremely closed minded, just the layers and layers and layers and layers, And I for some reason felt really indebted to them because they'd spent all this time basically integrating me into their law.
Why do I have permission to stop?
But I remember this one kind of like a confrontation we had whereas like you have to start turning the mirror in.
It is just not.
Helpful for you to be nitpicking every single person who enters your life to the point of like obsolescence, Like you nitpick them out of your life and then come back and play victim and then do it again with no remorse. It's so crazy. The issue was aside from this person being the way they were, they were also actually going through it like real life stuff was happening in tandem for years.
So it was one thing after the other.
So it's always hard to discern which is just like a situational thing, or are you this person? But after that confrontation, I was expecting for there to be some kind of resolution and it didn't come. It came in in the groundhogs there the same thing again and again, and so I did what my sometimes avoidant self would do. Split ghosted, ran away, And it was so interesting because
I was thinking when I was reading this. I've said it before as someone who's a big talker, a big chit chatter for me to ghost, it's actually quite difficult because I'm always chitchatt I'm always like letting you know how I'm feeling, what I'm going through whatever. So if you get me to the point where I don't want to talk at all, you've crossed the line. You've almost
done too much. Because there are a lot of things I'm like, no, we just talk it out, took it out, took it out, like, let's see each other's point of view.
No.
This though, is friendliness a charitable act if it's insince here, yes and no. Yeah, but maybe not friendship friendliness? Oh for sure, I think I think friendliness you can definitely give someone that vibe and have it be insincere. Friendship, however, and it seems like this person, the depressed person, feels that they have a friendship.
You gotta figure that out.
For me, the barometer would be if you were friends with them before they started displaying these depressed tendencies. Stay the course part of the course, fom don't leave, but if it's more that they are a constant downer and it seems to be a personality trait that doesn't suit you, then jump.
Misery loves company, as.
They'll say, So that's always space in the misery.
So I wouldn't advocate for leaving a friend who are depressed, clearly, but we all have years, months or years when we're a bit of a down vibe. Yeah, but when it comes back up, the gratefulness that you feel to your friends who's stuck around when you're in your darkest days, that's friendship, guys, That's yeah.
I think the better question here is like how honest you need to be about your reason for not wanting to continue a friendship.
It's not a good time to be like, you're not a good time mirror depress.
I feel like keep that to yourself respectfully, but just you can say I've done a little a little evaluation and I'm at this stage where like.
I can't hold space. Ill, Oh no, I just ghost. No, it's not that simple.
I just feel like having a bit of a.
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