Politics, Friendship, and the Search for Meaning

We hear the offer of friendship as something synonymous with insult because our Romantic culture has, from our youth, continuously made one thing clear: love is the purpose of existence; friendship is the paltry, depleted consolation prize.

The true friend is the other who hopes you’ll answer the call, who’s willing to challenge you and upset you in order to get you to look at yourself and ask yourself: What am I doing? What do I love? Who am I? The true friend is the other who has the courage to impose a conviction, who paints a substantive picture of the good, who prods and prompts

The dynamic of friendship is almost always underestimated as a constant force in human life. A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armoured personalities run into the inevitable natural disaste