Five reasons to have friends you disagree with
‘Agreeing to disagree’ is how you build a more complete picture of the world.
Hello and welcome back to Connection Hub! This week, I’m sharing something I wrote a while ago, in the spirit of encouraging diversity in your social interactions.
Gone be the days when we can only be friends with people who think like us. Here’s five reasons to have friends you disagree with.
If you ever find me bragging about anything, it’ll be how diverse my circle of friends is.
The ones who vote left would call the ones voting right racist and sexist. Others, who don’t vote at all, may wonder how I ended up hanging out with people so “caught up in the zeitgeist.”
I would talk about the law of attraction with one friend in the morning and then, in the afternoon, I’d hear jokes ridiculing the same law as BS and woo-woo.
Some of my friends make me more comfortable than others because their worldviews comply with my own. Others challenge me constantly, exposing that what I believe in is just that — beliefs.
This is one of the things I love the most about my life. I have collected a bunch of people who are so different that, if I brought them all together, it would be either the most exciting or awkward party of my life.
Thanks to this, I’m exposed to very different ways of living and thinking.
Here are five ways in which having friends of all backgrounds, ages, and beliefs enriches my life. I hope it will inspire you to expand your social horizons - or, appreciate the diversity you already have.
1. Seeing the spectrum of privilege
If you don’t leave your social bubble, your privilege (or lack of thereof) becomes your blind spot. You take what you have for granted. You believe in the limits programmed into your subconscious as if they were real.
Similarly, you may not appreciate that what you think of as your needs might seem like a fad to others.
While in college, I was surrounded by people similar to me. Our parents still supported us financially. Most of us either didn’t have to work at all, or only worked part-time to pay for more extravagant parties and travels.
I was lucky enough to meet a guy who wasn’t “like us.” Coming from a much poorer, working class family, he fought to stay afloat while finishing his studies.
During the months we dated, I’d often be the one paying for our cigarettes and shopping. In exchange, I received something of infinite value: an honest peek into a life of someone who wasn’t half as fortunate as I was.
Some of my other, more privileged friends joked about me dating this guy. It appeared that they considered themselves better than him and thought I deserved someone “better,” too. They laughed at the way he dressed and spoke, failing to see the good-natured and smart human I was seeing.
During that period I understood that, in this world, we don’t all start from the same place. Some are born with the resources that are the ultimate aspiration for others. This, however, doesn’t make anyone better or worse. It doesn’t say anything about who we are as people.
It just shows that the world doesn’t treat us all as equals. That’s why we need to choose equality consciously, and see every human being as worthy and, at the same time, flawed and imperfect.
2. Understanding that politics doesn’t need to divide people
In today’s climate, the above sentence almost feels like a revolutionary statement. I mean, obviously politics divides people. What’s more, it often divides them into two well-defined, polarized camps.
A part of me always opposed that the world has to be this way. My deep conviction is that we can agree to disagree — and continue to build relationships accordingly.
It took me a while to come to terms with this in my relationships. It’s one thing to repeat pretty slogans — and another to live them. So when I learned that a close friend with whom I always had a deep connection voted for a nationalist, xenophobic party, I was in deep conflict.
At first, I wanted to persuade him to change his mind. He proved a much better disputer than I was. Then, I questioned whether I should remain friends with him. After all, what he expressed through his voting choice was in deep contradiction with my values.
But with time, I saw another possibility: being at peace with the fact that I can’t change people. Even if we don’t align in what seems like crucial matters, this doesn’t mean we have to throw our friendship out the window.
We can still experience a part of our lives together, accepting that one another’s opinions will make us uncomfortable. If the value of friendship is large enough, we can agree to pay that price.
3. Challenging your beliefs
Most people choose to spend time only with those who validate their worldview. This is very pleasant — but also limiting.
We know how information bubbles work on social media. But can you see the same thing happening in your relationships? Instinctively, we’re drawn towards people who don’t challenge us. If you meet someone and they make you uneasy with what they say, you’ll likely say no to meeting them again.
I learned to sidestep this tendency when I was living in the countryside. While in a city, you have an infinite pool of people to choose your friends from. But when you’re in a village with less than 20 residents, social life is shaped by different forces.
Rather than picking people whose beliefs aligned with my own, I had to reverse my social strategy. Most people I met were very different from me. I had to look for connection despite those differences.
In the process, I learned that our differences weren’t necessarily obstacles. Instead, they served me. They exposed my biases and the opinions I took for granted before.
One day, I went to the house of a 90-year old concentration camp survivor and listened to his story. This man had no notion of such concepts as self-improvement or mindfulness — ideas I routinely use to navigate my life. Instead, he had the kind of wisdom that could only be accumulated through years of experience.
He showed me that no matter what I do, there are no shortcuts to becoming a better person. I can meditate on my emotions and thoughts all I want. I can develop self-awareness, focus, acceptance and other certainly valuable internal skills.
But these will never substitute living a raw, imperfect life, moment-to-moment. Because I got an insight into the old man’s perspective, I could finally grasp that.
4. Trying on different identities
Your sense of self emerges in relation to others. When you surround yourself with people who are dramatically different, you can explore new sides of your personality. You can discover new incarnations of yourself, so to speak.
Try meeting a person who’s always miserable and complains about their life — and then, someone who’s on top of their game. Speak to an ambitious scientist friend — and then a stoner who spends their days coming up with cool ideas they never pursue. Invite a shy bookworm for a coffee date and follow it up with grabbing beers with a party person.
See how you feel, think and behave around each of them.
Whenever I change company, my identity changes like the skin of a chameleon. I take on roles of a carer, a cool girl, a therapist, a spiritual person, playful child — you name it. Sometimes, I do it to align better with the other person. Other times, I instinctively create a counterbalance to their personality.
All those identity shifts are important because they show me that neither of my personas reflect who I am. We all put on appearances, behaviors and masks to fit the context. But ultimately, this isn’t us.
Having a diverse circle of friends helps you understand this faster. As you go from one friend to another, you see yourself adopting all different personas. You become more aware of how you interact with different people — and what makes you do that.
At the same time, you start realizing that none of your identities is lasting. This may make you ponder one of the most mysterious questions of humanity: Who am I?
5. Understanding that there’s no sngle truth
‘Things become possible once you believe they are.’
‘How you imagine the world is how you experience it.’
‘Your beliefs create your reality.’
These are just empty slogans until you get a chance to experience them in your life. Meeting people who see the world differently than you do (and differently to one another) exposes just how relative our understanding of “reality” is.
Even though we think we function in one world, the internal worlds of two different people are never the same. What’s self-evident for you may sound like an exotic concept to someone else. Or vice-versa — someone may share an experience so profoundly different from yours that you start questioning whether you operate according to the same laws of physics.
I remember the first time I heard a friend describe his out-of-body experience to me. This was so different from everything I ever heard before. I was deeply intrigued.
I know that if I repeated this to my other friends, they’d say I was hanging out with a lunatic. And this was the beauty of it. My various friends and I live in our private universes with our individual views of what’s possible, true, and even worth living for.
Closing thoughts
I have friends who, if they met each other, would either laugh into each other’s face — or politely excuse themselves and disappear into the abyss.
For this diverse circle of friends, I’m grateful.
I’m grateful because I have people in my life who remind me of just how complex and multidimensional human experience can be. Because of that, we sometimes struggle to respect each other’s truths and beliefs. We fail to acknowledge our privileges. We find it hard to imagine that someone else’s reality may be nothing like ours.
But if we learn to do it, then we can also learn how to agree to disagree. From this place, we can treat relationships as explorations of each other’s souls — rather than just means to reconfirm our beliefs.