There are certain qualities that should make you drop a friend – but obesity and depression don’t come into it
Have you done an audit of your friendship group lately? Have you measured the return on investment of each of your acquaintances? Have you used a pandemic that has killed millions of people as an opportunity to “prune” your social network and drop any pals who might have an unacceptably high BMI or experience depression? No? Well, in that case, you may be doing friendship all wrong.
That’s according to a viral piece in the New York Times, anyway. Titled How to Rearrange Your Post-Pandemic ‘Friendscape’, the article argues that we ought to think about friendship in terms of self-advancement. “Evolutionary anthropologists say it behooves us to take a more curatorial approach when it comes to our friends because who you hang out with determines who you are,” the article noted. It went on to explain that: “Depressed friends make it more likely you’ll be depressed, obese friends make it more likely you’ll become obese, and friends who smoke or drink a lot make it more likely you’ll do the same.” Yikes. Yikes. Yikes. Unsurprisingly, there was an outcry about this paragraph and the Times removed it.
Continue reading...from The Guardian https://ift.tt/3gmYncL
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