Why Everyone Should Be Friends With an Asshole
Life is more complicated than you think
There’s one key difference between friendly people and disagreeable people.
People who are overtly friendly and radiate positivity are that way because they have a strong aversion to negative emotions.
This sounds great when it comes to casual shoot-the-shit type situations.
But what about when something serious happens?
When your car breaks down and you need someone to pick you up, you’ll find that your happy-go-lucky-life-of-the-party ‘friend’ will be the one who responds seven hours later saying “sorry just got this, everything ok?” knowing full well that you’ve already figured it out by that point.
After you fail to get a hold of the people who you thought were your True Friends, you’ll reluctantly text that one guy from work who people avoid hanging out with and you’ll find that he drops everything to come get you.
When you’re stuck in the hospital with a medical emergency, your “I love him he’s such a cool dude” friend who everyone can’t get enough of will be nowhere to be found. Because your cancer/injury/other serious medical situation is a negative vibe, i.e. the one thing that bubbly good-vibes people seek to avoid as their raison d’etre.
The disagreeable friend who you previously weren’t sure even liked you will, surprisingly, turn up and sit by your bedside.
Many people are shocked and confused when this happens. It’s the type of situation that makes people say “that’s the moment when I learned who my true friends really are”.
It’s one of those key turning points in your life that causes you, years later, when someone says to you, “don’t invite that guy to the party he’s such a dick” to find yourself saying, “yeah, that might be true, but he was the only one who was there for me when no one else was”.
But it’s only surprising when you don’t understand the core reason why disagreeable people are the way they are: because unlike people who need to bathe themselves in positive emotions, casual dickheads are actually comfortable with negative feelings.
Everyone experiences a tragedy or two or three or twenty or fifty in their lives.
It’s inevitable.
You’ll naturally want someone to be there for you when the Universe decides to point the Eye of Sauron in your direction.
No matter how self-sufficient and independent you are/wish you were, you 100% need other people. It’s embedded in your DNA.
And trying to get a person who’s addicted to positivity to willingly insert themselves into a depressing/negative situation is like trying to force two magnets together.
Not gonna happen.
But a person who’s comfortable with casual negativity will naturally be able to handle more serious levels of it.
Your personal tragedy is a more extreme version of what they live with inside the confines of their skull every single day. An escalation and intensification of their reality, not a jarring polar-opposite departure from it.
I’ve seen this over and over and over again to the point where I’m comfortable with stating that this is a universal truth of human nature.
And once you internalize it, you’ll never see people the same way again.
Instead of viewing others as likable vs. unlikable, the binary vis-a-vis Core Type of Human will change to: addicted to positivity vs. comfort with negativity.
People have depths to them.
A common cliche states that “the way you do anything is how you do everything.”
That’s not exactly true. You can’t copy/paste a behavior 1:1 across time and space. People are more complicated than that.
If behaviors don’t transfer neatly across levels of seriousness, a person’s emotional makeup does.
A disagreeable vibe is often nothing more than a discomfort with casual social situations; or more significantly stated; an aversion to frivolousness and an intense longing for something real. People who present this type of affect have an emotional depth to them that their day-to-day life simply isn’t capable of satisfying.
A positive vibe conveys the opposite. It reveals a compulsive need for frivolousness and an intense fear of emotional depth and gravitas. Their good nature is the cloak that overly affable people use to shield themselves from the horrors of existence. It’s a way to avert their eyes from the things/people/situations that scare them. Positivity and cruelty are two sides of the same coin; you realize this when the happy vibes morph into the cold shoulder.
Many people learn this when it’s too late.
But you, reading these words on your screen right now on a random day in one of the normal phases of your life, have the opportunity to internalize it before a crisis hits and before you really need someone.
So choose your friends accordingly.
If you enjoy my writing you can also read my novel Your Life Does Not Exist, available in both physical and ebook editions.