COVER STORY
We are often told happiness comes from within, but maybe that’s wrong. Are we too focused on ourselves at the cost of nurturing friendships? As a new book emphasises the importance of bonding in the “me first” era, we talk to some high-profile Tasmanians
We celebrate the power of friends to create happiness, and ask some highprofile locals about their best buddies
The word “self” pops up a lot in popular and online culture these days. Self-awakening, self-fulfilment, self-care, self-development, self-help and so forth. And then there are those so-called inspirational quotes we see on social media telling us things like “happiness comes from within”. There is something to be said for a little introspection here and there, learning to love yourself, and being able to motivate and value yourself, but by turning so much of our focus inward, are we forgetting to look outwards? In nurturing ourselves, are we forgetting to nurture our relationships with others?
When we are constantly being bombarded with inducements to look inward, are we losing sight of how important it is for us to have company, to have friends? Good friends. Mounting evidence links loneliness to physical as well as mental illness. Research has shown loneliness stimulates a stress response in the body that can raise blood pressure and impair the immune system, among other effects. Studies have found strong social circles and regular social interaction are linked with living longer, and even introverts who claim to be happier alone are happier in the company of others.
Human interaction isn’t just something we enjoy, it is something we need, says Australian journalist Kate Leaver, who has just written a book on friendship.
“Loneliness is dangerous,” Leaver tells TasWeekend. “The health benefits of friendship and social interaction are hugely underestimated. I think doctors should be able to prescribe social interaction to treat people who present with symptoms of loneliness.” Leaver was born in Australia and was features editor at
Cosmopolitan magazine and senior editor at Mamamia before moving to London, where she freelances for The Guardian, The
Independent and Vice, among others. It was partly the experience of moving across the world that inspired her to write her book, The Friendship Cure (HarperCollins $29.99).
“I spent a year researching it, initially out of fear and then out of fascination,” Leaver says. “I was getting towards the end of my 20s and I read an article that said when you’re in your 30s, that’s when real life happens. You leave your friends behind, people get married, have kids, follow their careers and so forth, and because you’re not tied to your friends by either biology or marriage, they’re the first things to go from your increasingly busy life.
“That horrified me, especially as I’d only recently moved 12,500km away from my closest friends. So the first thing I did was send messages to all of my friends and make them promise to stay in my life forever. And the second thing I did was to start working on this book.”
Working on the thesis that close and abiding friendships are vital to all humans, and could actually be the key to avoiding all manner of ailments, Leaver did what any good journalist would do and started hunting down as many experts in the field as she could find, asking for their input.
She also recorded the anecdotal evidence from a long list of people who wanted to share their stories of friendship, and how their closest buddies enriched and completed them. She also spoke to her own friends and took a long hard look at herself. “I took note of how I speak to my friends, how often, the language I use, and how often I see them physically, in the same room. I kept a kind of mental diary of who is in my life and when, and it really made me reflect on what kind of friend I am and the kind of people I need in my life,” she says.
In her book, Leaver makes a solid case that fostering and maintaining good friendships is the best way to overcome solitude, ignorance, various health issues, angst and a range of other issues. Good friends will challenge us to think differently, validate who we are, encourage empathy and support us as we support them. But only if we treat friendship as a priority, something we nourish.
Leaver thinks those social media memes – the ones telling us to love ourselves first and foremost, and to find true happiness in solitude – are working against our basic need for company. “I’m extremely sceptical of the inspirational Instagram quote,” she laughs. “You often find that the type of people who post and share them are trying to project a certain harmony in their own lives that doesn’t necessarily exist.
“It’s interesting to see those words like self-care, effectively putting a brand on something good. Of course it’s good to look after yourself for mental-health reasons, the occasional bubble bath or appropriate medication is a good idea. But it does have a brainwashy feel to it, this campaign of introspection where it becomes kind of trendy to be self-motivated and self-fulfilled. In some ways it’s fantastic but, like many things, it’s going through this cycle of being slightly pretentious.”
Nevertheless, Leaver included a chapter in defence of social media as a way of making and maintaining friendships. There is a tendency to disregard online friendships as not being “real” friendships, but this is something Leaver disputes. “I’ve made a lot of new friends through social media and I use things like WhatsApp and Instagram to keep in touch with friends on the other side of the world, whereas before social media I might not have been able to keep in touch with them except by occasional, very expensive phone calls.
“Social media gets vilified a lot. There have been studies on social media and lots of academics like to link loneliness with it, but what isn’t clear is which one came first. Does social media cause people to become lonely and physically isolated, or are lonely people drawn to social media as a less confronting way of maintaining friendships?
“Of course social media can be a toxic influence sometimes, but it is also a wonderful facilitator of closeness, where we are able to be in one another’s busy lives in a way that might not have been possible otherwise.”
As far as Leaver is concerned, the true blight that can infect people’s friendship circles is not social media, but toxic friends, by which she does not necessarily mean “frenemies” or outwardly hostile acquaintances – though they are certainly a subset. More broadly, she is referring to the people we tend to cling to and keep around almost out of habit, even when they are a negative influence on our lives.
While it might seem difficult and maybe even clinical, she recommends doing occasional friendship audits. “A lot of people make that mistake with friends, valuing quantity over quality, but that’s not just something that happens on Facebook,” she says. “We do tend to hold on to people who aren’t good for us, for a variety of reasons. And they’re not necessarily bad friends, sometimes they’re just redundant friends, people you have no real connection with but you feel obliged to keep in touch with even though they might bring you down.
“If someone is not working as a friend but you once cared for them and are still fond of them as a human, you owe them some explanation for why you don’t want them in your life. A lot of ‘ghosting’ goes on, [people] simply vanishing from people’s lives with no explanation, which isn’t acceptable. But of course some psychologists say ghosting is fine if the person is truly toxic and you’re extracting yourself from an emotionally abusive relationship or something similar.
“So you need to work out if a particular friendship is toxic or not. And a toxic friend will often like to escalate the drama, create some confrontation over why you don’t want them in your life, so be prepared for that.”
Above all, Leaver says her book is a plea for people to be more realistic about friendships in their lives, and to be more “aggressively kind” towards one another.
“We tend to treat kindness as this passive thing that we just try to do in general, but I think we can be more proactive about being kind to others, actually deploy it as a strategy in our private and professional lives. All the small acts of kindness add up.”