Choosing Your Social Relationships

Screening Social Relationships

“Relationships” here means relationships with anyone.

I. Quality Relationships

(1) What Are They Like?

1. Mutual recognition, respect, nourishment, and support for each other’s growth and success.
2. Both people move toward each other, like partners in a dance, with at most an occasional step on the other’s toes and a laugh—not endless contortions to fit each other or constant strain.
3. A comparison of what nurtures you and what undermines you: a nurturing relationship makes you more expansive, relaxed, calm, authentic, grounded, steady, and unpretentious, rather than diminished, tense, agitated, false, hollow, confused, and superficial. Undermining you means impairing your judgment, draining you through inner conflict, and damaging both your abilities and your character. It also makes you strain; that is one of its original purposes: to suck you dry.

(2) People Fall into Different Tiers

Stay close to S-tier people and keep your distance from B-tier people. Spend more time with S-tier people, followed by A-tier people. Stay away from slick, mediocre people of B tier and below.

Better to go without than accept just anyone. We all understand the principle, but in practice we often become so hungry for connection that we take whatever we can get.

(3) Standards for Making Friends

1. Mutual respect

A common mistake is to assume that affection develops over time and familiarity makes people best buddies. Many so-called best buddies have no real mutual respect, let alone mutual understanding or appreciation. There may be affection between classmates, people from the same hometown, neighbors, or relatives, but that does not mean they can truly be friends of the heart and mind.

1. People with high-frequency energy

People of noble character, grounded in their fundamental outlook on the world, life, and values, and in the underlying qualities of their character. People who embody unpretentious truth, goodness, and beauty, humanism, internationalism, and Marxism-Leninism—genuine Marxism-Leninism.

(4) Love Yourself

Only people who love themselves have the capacity to love others. Only people who love themselves will be loved.

The secret to happiness: be strict in screening people and generous with yourself.

II. Stay Close to Those Who Nurture You and Away from Those Who Undermine You

(1) Keep Your Distance

Cut your losses quickly. There is no need to fear conflict. Do not people-please or write long explanatory messages.

(2) Stay Away from Cheap Relationships, Imitation Plastic Relationships, and Relationships Barely Worth Keeping

Giving in exchange for sincerity and believing that affection necessarily deepens with time are both mistaken ways of thinking.

The only person you can control is yourself. Do not expect to influence, cultivate, reform, or change others. When it comes to other people, all you can do is screen them and maintain your distance. Even—and especially—parents and children.

(3) Stay Away from Sick People, Toxic People, and Human Trash

There are few healthy people in this world. To put it vividly, it is a world of zombies. Stay away from people who spread sickness, toxicity, and garbage.

Save yourself before saving others. Blindly trying to save sick people and becoming infected and ill yourself is foolish.

1. People who negate your worth

Everyone experiences a lack of confidence and self-doubt; this is our greatest vulnerability. The doubts voiced by certain people often strike right at that vulnerability, and 99% of the time, those people’s doubts undermine you rather than help you grow.

What enters through a wound is more often poison than medicine. There is little sound advice that is hard to hear, and much that wounds—even Trojan horses in the form of psychological manipulation (PUA). Well-intentioned criticism and negating your worth are two different things.

1. Exploitative people

Vampires, monsters that suck out your vital energy, demons that drain your spirit. Many such people present themselves as bearers of hard-to-hear truths.

1. Stay away from cheap relationships, plastic relationships, and relationships barely worth keeping

People often become so hungry for connection that they take whatever they can get. But to save yourself, you must be willing to go without rather than accept just anyone.

(4) Disregard Most People

In fact, most people have already seen each other for the last time.

Most people do not even know how to care for themselves or their own children, or even care about them, much less care for or about you.

Do not try to please most people. Think of those whose lifelong profession is pleasing most people—politicians and people in entertainment. How many manage to do it well?

Your fear of “most people” is, in essence, a fear of the world and society. That makes it all the more necessary to find yourself and find quality relationships.

III. How to Screen People

Be strict in screening people and generous with yourself.

A. Screen and assess everyone around you, one by one: is your relationship one of mutual recognition, respect, and nourishment?

B. Does the other person have the capacity to love themselves and others? How do they treat their wife and children? Do they have genuine friends?

C. Another, clearer way to tell: if you set aside conventional social ties, blood ties, and existing relationships, and this person were simply a stranger, would you want to get to know them?

IV. People of Worth Take Their Time to Speak

Once your relationships are sorted out, you will say much less and get angry much less often.

You will no longer feel such urgency to speak, because the other person is listening and what you say has an effect.

“Communicate Only with First-Rate People and Those Beyond the First Rate”

p.s.

An excerpt from another essay, “The Numbness of Highly Sensitive People”: Highly sensitive people are sensitive to other people’s emotions, attitudes, and everything else, yet insensitive to the most central, most fundamental question: whether the other person truly loves and respects them. This terrifying, fatal numbness is conditioned into them during the first 20 or 30 years of life in a harsh environment.