Is Friendship Always Beneficial
Too often relationships are evaluated as good or bad, meaningful or meaningless, harmful or harmless. These kinds of dichotomous thoughts harm people by implanting extreme hostility toward strangers who are harmless. These thoughts can also lure people into a trap of hypocritical relationship that might look good on the outside but have a different purpose. Once a Roman philosopher, Seneca said, "Friendships always benefit; love sometimes injures." In this statement, friendships are evaluated as always good, but this thought could be wrong. Though friendships are meaningful and beneficial relationships in life, they could become meaningless or harmful.
We have few close relationships with some special friends. A relationship with best friend might be deep enough to talk about personal things like hardships or problems with other people. It makes people open themselves and relieve stress that come from those struggles. This clearly benefits mental state and occasionally is beneficial physically. However, in most friendships, like those with people in workplace, people don't have that strong connection. Generally, in a high school, a classroom has about 40 to 50 classmates. Among those students, we have about 10 to 20 close friends but only superficially know others. We can learn together, do projects in a same group, know each other's face and name, rarely but sometimes eat meals together, but still don't grow into beneficial friendship. When we are in this kind of friendship we feel that it's meaningless.
Also, there are some people who act as friend for different purpose. They might try to benefit from us financially by borrowing money or making us do something for them. More dangerous is a friendship with fair-weather friend. It is boring relationship which won't develop into a good friendship unless that fair-weather friend changes the behavior. Some of these fair-weather friends are fraud. I once heard from some foreigners who work in Korea talk about their experience of getting betrayed by their friends financially. Some of them invested in a friend's business and the friend ran away taking all that money. Thus, some of the friendships might be useless and even harm a person financially.
There is a saying that 'who keeps company with the wolf will learn to howl.' This means the characteristics of friends might well be your characteristics. People give great influence on each other especially in friendships. So, it is important to choose those with good characters. Being friends with those who have bad habits will end up harming yourself. For example, if a friend is gangster or uses drug, there is greater chance that the friend suggests you doing the same or you might automatically act in the same way. These bad habits, when acquired, are hard to remove and it can stay throughout your life.
It is true that friendship benefits people, but on some occasion, it doesn't. Some of the friends might be superficial, fair-weather friends or they might have bad habits that will eventually harm you. Seneca, the philosopher mentioned earlier, was also an author and politician. He served as a close adviser of Nero, the emperor of Roman Empire. Ironically, he was betrayed by Nero and had to suicide because of the emperor's command. Therefore, it is important to find true friendship instead of just having friendship with anyone. To protect yourself from dangerous friendships, it is better to distinguish who you want to be a friend with and who you don't want to be close.
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