friendship article

For a period of time, i used to cut out newspaper articles that i found meaningful. As i was cleaning up part of my room yesterday, i came upon some, so i want to share one of them today.

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A toast to friendship

In my more listless moments, i find myself aimlessly trawling through blogs and online diaries.

Perhaps what i'm looking for is some affirmation that there is drama in our otherwise humdrum Singaporean lives. Or at the very least, that we can ask dramatic questions where there is none to be found.

So it was with great relish that i lapped up a recent entry in the online diary of a friend of mine called Richard.

Entitled "Superficial Friends", it was in most parts a lengthy rant about the various ways his friends had failed him.

When Richard lost his job recently, his group of close friends consoled him. But when he asked one of them to approach his company's human resource department to ask for openings, that friend who works for a multinational giant - refused to help.

Richard then asked a second friend in the group what he thought of this surprising show of indifference. He was disappointed again when this friend chose to be diplomatic and refused to take sides.

"That's what the state of friendship has become in Singapore - too Westernised!" he bitterly concluded.

"Maybe some ancient Confucianism is worth instilling in Singaporeans if it begets you real friends who really go the whole distance to help you."

I didn't think much of this at first. In the no-nonsense, super-efficient society that we live in, there doesn't seem to be much point ruminating over life's fluffier questions.
Perhaps Richard simply wasn't as close to his friends as he had thought. Maybe they had good reasons of their own for not helping or supporting him.

Yet his slightly xenophobic proclamation struck a chord with me. And i kept turning the question over in my mind as i drove through the city streets, rushing from one place to another.

Is the nature of friendship really changing for the worse in Singapore?

I'm not sure if "Westernisation" is the right word to describe what is happening, but i can think of at least three reasons why we could be valuing our friends less this days.
The first is that Singaporeans have grown more self-centred. This has been a question of necessity than anything else, since Singapore has always championed meritocracy in a system that prizes self-reliance.

Whether it is making through a highly competitive education system, getting that plum job or making enough money to buy a new house or car, it is "every man for himself". The price of falling behind in life is high and there is virtually no safety net for failure.
This is not to say, of course, that we will not stop to help a friend if he is in need. But we count the cost very carefully, i suppose, and think about how such a favour might deduct from our lives.

A second reason is that a faster pace of life is increasing the premium that we place on our free time.

With only a precious few hours left to ourselves a week, we start to take an increasingly utilitarian approach to friendships, as if to try and get a bigger bang for our buck.

Who entertains us more with funny stories, we ask. And who will willingly lend a listening ear when i'm down, or have the connections to help me in times of trouble?

Finally, the more successful and affluent we become as a people, the more we seem to value our privacy. Yet the strongest friendships are between people who make themselves vulnerable to each other by hiding no secrets.

So like the rich suburbanites who inhabit the hit television series Desperate Housewives, we are fine with talking and laughing about everything under the sun at dinner or drinks, but the relationship lacks intimacy and we turn uncomfortable the moment a personal problem crops up.

Most of the time, we don't want to get involved.

On the odd occasion that we do, we wonder if we're being too nosy. I'm currently helping two friends, a couple, deal with the entry of a third party into their relationship. As i send off SMS messages so long they have to be split into four parts, i catch myself and wonder if anyone other than Starhub thinks i'm doing the right thing.

What's the point of all of this?

Only to say that we are so concerned about the weakening of family ties that we run ads on television to remind ourselves, but no one really ever pays attentions to the spectre of fading friendships.

When you consider the increased stress that modern society puts on working adults these days, friends are underrated as a resource and families overrated.

We choose our friends, but with the exception of our spouse, we never really get to choose our family. And much of our interaction with family members is, in any case, guided by societal roles we are obliged to play - what is the right thing to do as a good husband, sister, father or daughter.

With our best friends, however, we can truly be ourselves. We tell them everything - the good, the bad and the downright unsavoury. We heatedly trade views on subjects like love, sex and money, allowing our thinking to be fashioned by their opinions.
In short, our families may have made sure we grew up well-adjusted but it is often our friends who make sure that we stay that way.

I can't count the number of times i wouldn't have got through a crisis or made an important life-changing decision, had it not been for my friends.

Don't get me wrong. I'm not saying that family ties aren't important. Sometimes, as an added bonus, our family members are our friends as well.

But in place like Singapore, where a strong, family-centred conservatism clashes often with fast-changing cultural and moral norms, this is often not the case.

So here's to my shopaholic, gym-obsessed, mahjong- and karaoke-crazy friends. And yours too, whoever or whatever they may be.

For "life leads the thoughtful man on a path of many windings. Now the course is checked, now it runs straight again," starts a poem found in the I-Ching that has been sttributed to Confucius.

"But when two people are at one in their inmost hearts, they shatter even the strength of iron or of bronze. And when two people understand each other in their inmost hearts, their words are sweet and strong, like the fragrance of orchids." "


------ from the article by Ignatius Low, taken off an old issue of The Straits Times.