MAKE FRIENDS WITH PEOPLE WHO WANT THE BEST FOR YOU

Less than a week into this experiment, I’d taken to sleeping with Peterson’s book on my bedside table, along with a copy of the Bible, because he refers to it so often. It’s a strange new world.

I wasn’t doing so well with the rules. I was struggling with my posture, and wasn’t really treating myself much better than I had before. I was eating protein-rich breakfasts at more or less the same time each day, which Peterson advocates. But then I blew it on Rule 3.

Rule 3 says you should make friends with people who want the best for you, but the chapter is really all about who you shouldn’t be friends with — namely, the people who are going to bring you down.

“Before you help someone, you should find out why that person is in trouble. You shouldn’t merely assume that he or she is a noble victim of unjust circumstance and exploitation,” Peterson writes. “It is far more likely that a given individual has just decided to reject the path upward, because of its difficulty.”

You can’t save people who

don’t want to help themselves, he says.

I blew it on Rule 3 because of Sam. That’s not his real name. Sam was a friend of mine who lives in Fort McMurray, working in the oil sands. He stopped getting full-time work after oil prices tanked, not long before his house burned down in the devastating wildfire that swept through the city in 2016. He ended up in his family’s cottage, alone, unemployed. He drank a lot.

Sam used to call me, always at night, almost always drunk. Sometimes it would be fine. Other times he would rant.

I answered more and more infrequently. Occasionally, he would text me belligerently. Get off your high horse.

He stopped calling eventually, months ago, and I was relieved.

But then I read Chapter 3, and all I could think about was Sam. He was the type of friend Peterson would say you should drop, but I just wanted to talk to him again. Sober, he was one of the people who understood me best, and I’d thrown that away.

So I called him. I asked why he’d stopped calling.

“Because I figured you were tired of talking to me,” he said.

I told him Jordan Peterson says you should try to keep friends around who want the best for you, not people who are going to drag you down. He said he fits into

the category of people who want the best for me. “But I kind of wandered into the second one,” he said. “I think for a couple of months, I was pretty toxic for everyone.”

I said I felt I’d lost the good parts of our relationship along with the bad. I was crying by this point.

Sam told me he’s working again, planning to rebuild his home in Fort McMurray. He’s drinking less. And I kept thinking, ‘I wasn’t going to call him again. I might never have known.’

Later that evening, I messaged another friend, Eva Holland, to ask about Rule 3. When I was going through a crisis of my own, I used to write to her practically every day to tell her how hopeless everything was. She never stopped answering.

“Certainly there was a period where I would have felt like I was putting in more than I was getting out from our friendship,” she said. “There have also been times when I felt really low and you tried to prop me up.”

I realized I’m not sure how to navigate this world that Peterson envisions, where we assume the worst of each other until proven wrong.

“The irony, of course, is that we’re all the taxing friend when we are the ones who need help,” Eva said. “In other words, if everyone followed the rule, no one would be able to follow the rule.”