Good friends don’t help each other lie to themselves. Good friends challenge each other to do hard things, to be disciplined, to make great choices. Why are such friends so rare? Why is it so hard to find people to give us the honest and supportive feedback we need?
To help your friends succeed means that there is a chance that they will surpass you. In helping them, you are making a sacrifice for them. You are putting your time and your reputation on the line in order to help them be stronger. Potentially stronger than you. If this happens, will they thank you for it? Or will they leave you in the dust, not even realizing that you helped? If they are good friends, then hopefully they will return the favor, helping you grow stronger with them.
To help another grow strong, we must have trust that they are not fragile. We must trust that they are spiritually capable of absorbing the feedback that we have for them. We must trust that they are strong enough to push back and give us the feedback that WE need.
If we live in a culture where it is not normal for friends to give each other deep and difficult feedback, then any attempt to do so will look like you’re just being an asshole. It will not be taken the right way, and instead of creating a super-symbiotic growth feedback loop, providing the feedback that your friends need will only lead to them isolating themselves from you. This leaves us in a difficult position with one of two choices:
You give your friends the harsh feedback they need, but don’t want to hear, leading to their distancing themselves from you.
You withhold your feedback from your friends, leading to your mutual weakness and superficiality
Of course, this decision becomes easier to make if you don’t care about ostracism from your friend group. And why should you? The choice is between the following: to have weak “relationships” with weak people, or to be alone with integrity. I don’t love option #1, but it sounds a lot more meaningful than option #2. So I frequently find myself walking down the first path, and spending a lot of time by myself, a member of the outgroup.
What does society say when we want to tell our friend to stop drinking? That he needs to lose weight? Society says that this is not our place—that it is not our prerogative to insert ourselves into the personal decisions of those around us. We are told that the worst thing we can do to a person is make them feel shame—a friend should never do that!
The thing is, this logic only applies when someone isn’t making shameful decisions. Most people seem to agree, for example, that when someone cheats on another, that merits some sort of social discouragement. But in most other cases where someone is making a decision that is self-defeating, we have decided that it isn’t kosher to step in and put that behavior in check. We need to “respect people’s boundaries,” we are told.
The thing is, “respecting people’s boundaries” leaves no space for us to challenge each other to be stronger and more agentic. It rests on an assumption that everyone else will figure things out on their own, without our help. To fully respect boundaries precludes interaction: to interact we must cross boundaries! Otherwise, we are each isolated in our own little bubble.
So I say, call your friends out! Tell the alcoholic that she has a problem. Tell your obese friend that he is getting fat. It sounds ugly, and from a certain point of view it is. But it’s less ugly than letting the people around you lie to themselves. If, as a culture, we got into a habit of not letting our friends off the hook, I think we would be a much happier, healthier, and stronger civilization.
Note: giving feedback doesn’t require that you think you are better than everyone else. It means that you have the courage to challenge others, which means that sometimes you will discover that it is you who need to change. But in our lamentably superficial culture, this probably won’t occur unless you initiate the tough conversations.
Or even worse when people come to you to ask for feedback on something they know they shouldn’t do but still doing.
There’s a third option which is a more subtle way of going about it that does not require isolation necessarily.
“By asking what seemed to be innocent questions, Franklin would draw people into making concessions that would gradually prove whatever point he was trying to assert. “I found this method the safest for myself and very embarrassing to those against whom I used it; therefore, I took a delight in it.”
Although he later abandoned the more annoying aspects of a Socratic approach, he continued to favor gentle indirection rather than confrontation in making his arguments [2].”
From https://www.juandavidcampolargo.com/blog/innocent-questions