Friends and Shared Responsibility

 Out of all the acquaintances we hold, few of them turn out to be our friends. To me, attempting to explain the evolutionary necessity of maintaining friends doesn’t strike me as particularly obscure or unobvious—the union and symbiotic interaction between two individuals who express a mutual connection for each other appears to be a characteristic that would have proved advantageous when human survival was competitive. The idea of two friends that could help each other out in trying times, complement each others strengths and weaknesses, and entertain each other seems to be useful for each of the two friends’ survival advantage and contentment.

However, the manner in which we form friends, the formation of deep connections between me and others, and the “gut instinct” to trust friends seems like an interesting quirk in human behavior, on account of its universality and simultaneous strangeness. Why do we tend to trust our friends, and why is it that we feel safer around them than we do around strangers? Through I speculate that this subject has physiological explanation rooted in hormones, and entails psychological associations between people and emotions, I feel that probing this question of friends from a existential point of view is also fruitful.

After all, we make friends with other people, who have their own minds, own lives, own perspectives, and own selfish motives. In order to say anything that someone else can understand, I must communicate in a medium that is shared between us all, and that can be understood by most people living in our shared reality. Given the symmetric nature of friendship, and its altruistic and compassionate nature, when contrasted with our goals and actions, which are generally ultimately (though not directly) made for our own self-benefit (the question of whether the action is made at the expense of short term gratification, or it is a rash action taken out of blind greed for present reward is a different one, since both actions are taken for perceived self-benefit, whether short term or long term), there arises a compromise that humans must make between acting in self-interest and sacrificing one’s wishes in the interest of the friend or the quality of the friendship.

I first wish to give a few examples from my personal life of the exhibition of the above theme. Having had, like most people I know, the privilege of being surrounded by people who are similar enough to me to conduce a bond of friendship, but different enough to complement my peaks and valleys of my personality, I feel that the push and pull between self-interest and compromise for the individual is most evident when there is a shared responsibility between the person and the friend. (Using such a general definition of friend, I realize that this theme seems to be evident in other relationships: spousal, filial, and perhaps even societal; however, I’ll maintain the specificity of friendship to explore this dynamic particularly when it comes to the semi-formally established bounds of friendship, unlike those between parent and son, or husband and wife).

I had a classmate once, with whom I was assigned to lead our schools Biology Olympiad Club during junior and senior year of high school. I would consider this classmate to be a reasonable, driven, and somewhat self-interested person, though respectful towards me, and assume that assessment of our relationship would be reciprocated by her. We were leading the same club, both working towards the common constrained resource of club meeting time, the nature of club meetings, leadership organization, and club involvement in events and exams. If I had to lead the club alone, or if she had to lead the club alone, I feel the leadership would have been devoid of the tension that often resulted as a consequence of our differing visions for the club at times.

Thankfully, our discussions remained civil and our disagreements did not erupt to a point where they impeded our interactions or friendship. Nevertheless, I recall a couple of incidents that spoke to me about the negative emotion that could arise as a consequence of such disagreement. While the role that the course of the club would play in my live compared to the degree of protectiveness and distrust I experienced is dubious, it says something about the things that I got attached to, and the motives behind my desire to disagree. Who would send the club meeting reminder, who would be present at the club enrichment fair, how would the club leadership be organized, who would speak to the club advisor regarding exam and club logistics—such were issues that were often the subject of our petty disagreements. I feel that the reason that these issues troubled me slightly had less to do with the matter upon which we were disagreeing, such as who gets to send the meeting email, and slightly more to do with a fear that by letting the other person send the email, that I am missing out on something that would be advantageous for myself.

On the flip side of the coin, I also feel that shared responsibility or a mutual sense of obligation can also bring friends closer together and contribute to the formation of positive memories. Again in junior year, I participated in a bioengineering competition, in which I was invited to a team of students in my biotechnology class who were forming a team. Like my interactions with my club partner, I also found myself disagreeing with my teammates, similarly over petty things—such as whether we should do another take for a video recording, or (perhaps I was a somewhat disagreeable person, based on my reflections upon these past two events, though it is hard to say the extent to which that carries over to who I am today, partially because I think myself to have grown personally in the time since those events, in addition to the fact that I feel that I am going through the formative years of my life, in which my personality and sense of self is volatile).

Despite these disagreements, I have attached a mildly positive attitude towards my memories from that competition, and am grateful for the chance to have grown closer with my friends, develop a project poster and presentation, present our presentation alongside them, and spend a day walking around and enjoying the scenery at Berkeley for the day. At minimum, I can confidently claim to have, through the duration of the project, learned more about my teammates, become closer friends with them, develop a shared sense of pride in our project, and formed memories alongside them.

All in all, I find it difficult to comment upon the necessity of friendship, or the aspects of such relationships without which life is less bearable, primarily, I suspect, because I have not lived a significant part of my life without friends. Nonetheless, I appreciate friendship for its nature that compels one, in friendships that involve shared responsibilities, to exhibit compassion and shared regard for the friend, as well as the positive emotion, unique memories, and sense of belonging that it provides.