ON FRIENDSHIP AND OTHER DELUSIONS

Friendship It's one of those words. We say it with extraordinary ease. We have childhood friends, coworkers, friends from Facebook, friends we haven't seen in twenty years, and even people we've just met and are introducing—without much modesty—as friends. Perhaps no other human relationship has been subject to such an inflation of language. We call friendship so many things that we've finally managed to make the word mean very little.

More than two thousand years ago, Aristotle—my favorite philosopher– had the clarity of mind to distinguish between what we insist on mixing together. He spoke of friendships born of utility, pleasure, and virtue. The first last as long as the other person is convenient for us; the second, as long as their presence gives us some pleasure; only the last aims to love the other person for who they are and not for what they represent or provide. What is surprising is not that such a classification remains valid. What is truly revealing is that, after twenty-three centuries, we continue to call the following "friendship": three.

Perhaps there has never been a golden age of friendship. We like to imagine a past in which men shook hands and a promise was worth more than a contract; a time of letters written over the course of months, unannounced visits, and conversations that lasted until dawn. Surely there was plenty of that, but there was also betrayal, self-interest, abandonment, and calculation. Human nature wasn’t born with the cell phone. Judas needed thirty pieces of silver, not an Instagram account. Technology didn’t invent our capacity to use others; it simply made it faster, more visible, and extraordinarily efficient.

Prosperity possesses a curious gravitational pull. Around those who are successful, affection, admiration, invitations, phone calls, smiles, and a multitude of people willing to share their time appear. There isn’t always malice in this. Human beings instinctively seek out what shines—what can open doors, provide security, prestige, fun, or simply the pleasant feeling of being close to someone for whom things are going well. The problem begins when we confuse that orbit with genuine affection. Prosperity attracts company; only misfortune can prove it.

Because misfortune has a characteristic that is rarely mentioned: simplify. It strips away embellishments, titles, invitations, and possibilities. It restores the individual to being an individual once again. When someone loses ground, money, influence, or simply going through a phase where he no longer has much to offer, a strange disappearance begins. Some vanish slowly; others do so with a remarkable effectiveness. The calls become less frequent, the visits come to an end, the messages stop coming. No one has argued with anyone. There was no betrayal. It simply stopped being an interesting place to be.

That’s when the true measure of certain relationships becomes clear. And it’s not necessarily about money. Providing financial help may be impossible; standing by someone during a prolonged period of misfortune can be difficult even for those who love them. No one is obligated to save anyone. But there is a much more basic form of affection that requires neither bank accounts nor heroic sacrifices: remembering. Asking how you’re doing. Asking if you’ve eaten. Showing up from time to time without offering solutions. Standing for a few minutes in the face of someone else’s ruin without feeling the need to escape from it. There are silences that cost far more than any help that was never asked for.

In 1923, Jimmy Cox wrote Nobody Knows You When You're Down and Out, a song that Bessie Smith would, years later, become one of the greatest musical testaments to the volatility of human companionship, and that Nina Simone would later take it back to his own territory. His argument is almost obscenely simple: as long as there is money, friends abound; when it is lost, they disappear. A century later, we continue to hear it because nothing essential has changed. We have changed our currency, our clothes, our cities, and the ways we communicate. The mechanism remains intact.

Montaigne He went even further when writing about his friendship with Étienne by La Boétie. For him, many of the relationships commonly referred to as friendships were nothing more than acquaintanceships and familiarities sustained by some circumstance or convenience. He reserved that word for something far more rare. Perhaps that is where the problem lies: we have turned an exception into an everyday category. We say “my friends”with the same nonchalance with which we say “"my shoes”, as if abundance were proof of authenticity. But a man can probably meet thousands of people, be loved by hundreds, and go through his entire life without finding more than one or two true friends. Some may not find any at all.

Also Cicero He realized that adversity had a revealing value. Friendship, he thought, made misfortune more bearable by sharing its burden. There is an ancient beauty in that idea because it does not require the friend to eliminate the suffering. It asks for something much more human: to carry a small part of it for a while. Modernity, on the other hand, seems to have developed little tolerance for the decline of others. We like people who are determined, productive, and optimistic—people capable of picking themselves up, reinventing themselves, and starting over. We admire the fallen only once they have already gotten back on their feet. While they remain on the ground, we look the other way.

The social networks They’ve added a tremendous irony to all of this. We’ve never had so many friends, nor have we ever been so perfectly equipped to forget them. We know who went on a trip, who had dinner at a certain restaurant, who got a new car, and whose birthday it is—because a machine reminds us. We can observe the lives of hundreds of people without truly participating in any of them. Presence has been replaced by signs of presence. A heart under a photo can mean affection, courtesy, habit, or absolutely nothing. We’ve managed to create a society where everyone seems to be in good company, yet a considerable number of people spend their worst nights in complete solitude.

But it would be too easy to blame screens. Even before they existed, we were already walking away, already calculating, and already carefully choosing who we wanted to be seen with. Technology merely removed some masks and added others. The real issue remains the value we place on a person once that person ceases to have social value. That’s where affection and business diverge. Loving someone while they’re successful is easy. Loving them when their name no longer opens doors, when they can’t invite us anywhere, when their conversation has lost the sparkle of the good old days, and when spending time with them doesn’t enhance our own image—that demands a kind of loyalty that’s much rarer.

Perhaps that is why true friendship, if it exists, has something irrational about it. It yields no dividends, does not necessarily improve our situation, and sometimes demands our time precisely when we are least willing to give it. From the strict logic of exchange, it is a bad deal. And perhaps that is where its only potential for greatness lies: Affection begins to be genuine precisely when it ceases to be profitable.

This does not mean that everyone who drifts away is insincere, nor that every absence constitutes a betrayal. Life separates us, time transforms us, and each person carries tragedies unknown to others. There are legitimate distances and inevitable goodbyes. But when a person’s disappearance aligns too perfectly with the loss of what once made them attractive to us, it’s at least worth calling things by their proper names. Some people didn’t abandon us. It’s simply that the invisible benefit that kept them close has come to an end.

And then perhaps we'll discover something even more serious: that we didn't lose as many friends as we thought, because to lose something, you first have to have had it. Misfortune doesn't always empty a house; sometimes it simply turn on the light.

Yet there remains that human stubbornness to keep believing. We continue to use the word “friendship,” we continue to hope to find it, and we continue to feel its absence as if we had been deprived of something that was rightfully ours. Perhaps it is one of our most beautiful delusions. We need to believe that someone will stay when there is nothing left to celebrate, no photograph to share, and no benefit to be gained. Someone who won’t ask what they can get out of our lives before deciding whether it’s worth staying in them.

If that to be If it exists, we'll have to call it friend.

As for everyone else, out of respect for a word we've already overused, perhaps we should start referring to them simply as "acquaintances.".