The 2 Types Of “Friends” You Should Cut All Ties With

Not all friends are created equal.

It’s a longstanding tradition among the Chinese to have steamboat for dinner on the first day of the Lunar New Year — and an even longer-standing tradition to trade stories, gossip, and bond over the simmering communal stew.

2020 was no different — except this was the first time in 24 years I actually had reunion dinner with my Dad.

My Dad was, is, a workaholic entrepreneur. Festivals and weekends equal prime business hours, so we never got to spend time together during the holidays.

Not that he was a bad father, far from it, but it was just the way things were growing up. As a child, I remember him less for spending quality time with me and more for the stories he used to tell. He recognized that we were not spending enough father-son time together, so in a bid to prevent me from going wayward, he used fables to teach me life lessons.

When I was younger, it was Aesop’s, over and over. The Hare And The Tortoise was his personal favourite. As I grew older, the stories became more visceral, more real. Fiction gave way to personal anecdotes.

That night, on our first reunion dinner together, we talked about the importance of friendship.

經朱者赤, 近墨者黑

It’s one of my Dad’s favourite quotes. It literally translates to:

Being close to cinnabar makes one red, being close to pitch makes one black.

I’ve touched on this before. Simply being surrounded by positive, like-minded people on a week-long writing retreat gave me the courage to finally write.

That night, we talked about the other side of the coin.

The “friends” who will, intentionally or not, doom you. You should avoid these people like they have the Wuhan Coronavirus. If you let them in, they will strangle all positivity out of your life and rob you of any chance of success.

#1 Ingrates

“An ungrateful man is like a hog under a tree eating acorns, but never looking up to see where they come from.”

— Timothy Dexter, 18th American businessman and writer

There’s no tactful way to put this across, so I’m going to come right out and say it.

Don’t associate with ungrateful people. They are wolves in sheep’s clothing, robbers with cold iron knives masquerading as beggars with empty wooden bowls.

My dad made his point in this story:

Imagine you belong to a well-to-do family residing in a village. Suddenly, a great storm hits. The crops are drowned and many houses are destroyed. Your neighbour comes to you in his time of need, seeking asylum. Naturally, being the civic-minded person that you are, you take him in. You feed him, clothe him, and shelter him from the ferocious storm.

When the storm breaks, you bid farewell to the asylum-seeker, and pass him some food from your own pantry. Before leaving, he shakes your hands and thanks you profusely for your kindness. He goes about telling everyone of your generosity and altruism, brandishing about the food you gave them as evidence of their newfound friendship.

A few tranquil weeks pass by, and all is well. Suddenly, you hear knocking on your door. It’s the neighbour again. He shows up with a smile on his lips and one hand rubbing his stomach. He’s hungry, he says, and the food you gave him has all but run out.

Unfortunately, since the storm has destroyed the crops, your own food supplies are low too.

You gently tell him that you don’t have enough to share, but you still give what you can — a handful of seeds. “Take this and sow it,” you say. “In no time at all they will grow into tall healthy crops with seeds of their own, and you shall never go hungry again.”

Your neighbour takes the seed with one grasping hand thanks you to your face, then proceeds to tell everyone how cheap you are, how utterly stingy and miserable. Wealth has made you a different person, he proclaims, and the storm has washed away your charitable veneer and unveiled your true colours.

Since just a few weeks ago he was singing your praises and boasting to everyone how close you were — everyone believes him.

And that, my friends, is how associating with an ingrate can royally screw your life up.

It’s not about the people who believe in him. The truth will come out sooner rather than later, and the people who truly matter will not be shaken by lies.

It screws your life up because it makes you want to stop being helpful. Being blamed for something you didn’t do sucks — being maligned when you’re helping someone from the bottom of your heart is 10x worse. Unfortunately, I’m speaking from personal experience.

Someone who I thought was a close friend turned out to be Judas in disguise. I helped him reach his goals by introducing him to people he would otherwise have never met and talked him out of rough patches by helping him reframe his darker thoughts.

But once I started to find a modicum of success, his insecurities got the better of him, and he invented wild reasons, all valid in his head I’m sure, of why I’m the scum of the earth.

And that’s the root cause of betrayal: jealousy and insecurity. Learn from my mistakes, and cut ingrates out of your life.

#2 Energy Vampires

“…they glory in decay and despair, they drain peace, hope, and happiness out of the air around them…Get too near a Dementor and every good feeling, every happy memory will be sucked out of you. If it can, the Dementor will feed on you long enough to reduce you to something like itself — soul-less and evil.”

— J.K Rowling on Dementors

These are soul-sucking individuals.

They may be depressed, jaded, narcissistic or simply salty. In their heads, the cup is always half empty. They view the world as a gloomy place filled with teeth — something to be detested and feared. What a terrible way to live.

I call them energy vampires because they feed on emotions. Like the Dementors from the Harry Potter series, they have an uncanny ability to enter a room and drain it of positivity, leaving it cold and somehow….lesser.

In 1-on-1 situations, it gets even more insidious. They attach themselves on people like leeches, draining your lifeforce over the span of months, even years. You make concession after concession for them out of empathy, and only realize how miserable you’ve been after you break things off.

I’m sure you’ve come across people like this. If you’re extra lucky like me, you’ve even dated some of them.

The sad thing is most energy vampires are damaged individuals. They are attracted to empathetic people, knights in shining armour who are strong and willing to extend a helping hand.

They may or may not be intentionally malevolent, but to associate with them is to be in a toxic relationship, one mired in drama and negativity. In this situation, I am reminded of a quote from a children’s horror series I used to read:

“But then it isn’t his fault,” I said, frowning. “If he was born bad, he isn’t to blame for growing up evil.”

“No more than a lion is to blame for being a predator,” Mr Crepsley agreed.

I thought about that. “If that’s the case, we shouldn’t hate him — we should pity him.”

Mr Crepsley shook his head. “No, Darren. You should neither hate nor pity a monster — merely fear it, and do all in your power to make an end of it before it destroys you.”

― Darren Shan, Killers of the Dawn

Energy vampires are attracted to knights in shining armour, but the sad thing is it can go both ways.

Empathetic people can be drawn to damaged people too, like doomed moths to a burning flame. It’s called the “white knight syndrome”, feeling the need to rescue a broken individual from themselves, like a knight from a fairytale rescuing a damsel in distress. It never ends well.

The best thing one can do in this situation is simply not engaging. You’re not responsible for fixing the world, and sometimes the best thing one can do to rescue a drowning person is to throw out a lifebuoy, not to jump in and be one yourself.

You’ll get drowned.

You’ve Got To Go To Grow

I saw a post on Facebook that puts this point across very well. It said:

Just because you lost me as a friend doesn’t mean you’ve gained me as an enemy. I’m bigger than that. I still want to see you eat — just not at my table.

Sometimes, you’ve got to go to grow. Like a young man leaving home, or a snake moulting skin it's grown too big for. It’s possible to grow too big for relationships, too.

It doesn’t mean that there has to be negativity involved, or any drama. When we’re young, we think that life is about acquiring things. As we get older and wiser, we realize that life is actually about losing things. Over time, we lose our teeth, our hair, our eyesight, and yes, our friends.

The beautiful thing about life is that those that matter will eventually catch up with you further down the path, at a different time and place. We’ll trade stories, revel in things we’ve learned and wax nostalgic about the good old days.

And if they don’t? Then that’s okay too. We all have our own paths to walk, and its better to be grateful for our shared time together than grow bitter by wanting them to last forever.

A note to everyone I’ve cut off, remember, I still want to see you eat.

Just not at my table.

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