Happiness & the Three Levels of Friendship
A secret unlocked from 2300 years ago
“Real friends offer both hard truths and soft landings.” — Anna Quindlen, 2012
Do you know anyone who’s constantly transactional?
They ask you to do them a favor and they’ll provide one in return for you. Hopefully.
They predicate their willingness to be faithful to you based on your fealty to them.
But you know, deep down, that if you don’t play their tit-for-tat game, that the loyalty (which wasn’t really loyalty in the first place) evaporates like the wispy veil of fog that the relationship was.
Aristotle wrote his masterpiece of moral philosophy, the Nicomachean Ethics around 350 BC. In it, you’ll find a secret formula: Aristotle’s vision for how human beings can achieve happiness.
The concept is called eudaimonia, which is translated from Greek as ‘well-being,’ ‘happiness,’ ‘blessedness,’ and in the context of the ethics that Aristotle endorsed, ‘human flourishing.’
How do we flourish? Through the relationships we have.
Relationships spouses and partners, parents and children, friends and acquaintances, co-workers and employees.
In my work as an executive coach, I help clients pay closer attention to the relationships they forge, both in their personal and professional lives.
Because skimming along the surface of life without deeper connections is a recipe for unhappiness and failure.
The Three Levels of Friendship
All relationships have the basis of some form of friendship, as Aristotle identified, and they come in three levels.
The Friendship of Utility
These friendships are based on what someone can do for you, or what you can do for another person. It might be that you put in a good word for someone, and they buy you a gift in return.
Such relationships have little to do with character, and can end as soon as any possible use for you or the other person is removed from the equation.
The Friendship of Pleasure
These are friendships based on the enjoyment of a shared activity or the pursuit of fleeting pleasures and emotions.
This might be someone you go for drinks with, or join a particular hobby with, and is a common level of association among the young, so Aristotle declared.
This type of relationship can again end quickly, dependent as it is on people’s ever-changing likes and dislikes.
“Friendship was given by nature to be an assistant to virtue, not a companion to vice.” — Marcus Tullius Cicero, c. 45 BC
The Friendship of Virtue
These are the people you like for who they are. People who typically influence you positively and perhaps push you to be a better person.
This kind of relationship, based on the character of two self-sufficient equals, is more stable than the previous two categories.
While Aristotle lamented the rarity of such mutually-appreciative relationships, it’s not that he didn’t think it was possible; but he knew what it takes: two virtuous people who can invest the time and energy required to forge such a bond.
And that’s just as rare these days as it was in 350 BC.
“One’s friends are that part of the human race with which one can be human.” — George Santayana, c. 1914
While friendships of utility and pleasure have their place, working at elevating them to the coveted friendships of virtue is an important part of achieving eudaimonia in our own lives.
That’s how we’ll be remembered: through the relationships we create and nurture.
In the end, nothing else matters.
“Think where man’s glory most begins and ends,
And say my glory was I had such friends.” — William Butler Yeats, 1937
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There’s so much to learn,
Really enjoyed this piece. Simple, direct and powerful.