Your High School Friendships Died Out? Rejoice!

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I recently had an opportunity to meet up with a friend of mine from high school. He actually went to a different school, but we shared similar values and traveled in similar extracurricular circles, so we stayed somewhat in touch over the years after graduating. We chatted over what we had accomplished in the preceding years, where we were thinking of going in life, and reminisced a little about people we knew.

We both found ourselves saying that several of our friendships that we thought at the time would last us a lifetime — or at least until we turned 30! — ended up fizzling out pretty quickly after high school. Save a meetup here on a break from school or a Facebook message there, the friendships we had spent years of our relatively young lives building had fallen by the wayside.

Some — perhaps most — people would be tempted to get romantic here and try to rekindle these friendships. Many have made such attempts — I did on multiple occasions. These were usually just to friends telling me they only thought of speaking with me when drunk or when thinking about some weird, niche subject only I was interested in learning more about.

There’s a sentimental tug when you go back to your hometown or see on Facebook that a friend from high school is nearby. You may even exchange messages about “reconnecting” or “grabbing coffee,” but rarely does anything come to fruition. You slowly come to realize that you probably aren’t going to really reconnect with this person again — save for obligatory functions like a potential funeral or outing in the same city. Cue the sappy movie scene where a dubbed-over voice says something about how we all grow up, get on with our lives, and time keeps ticking.

Your friendships with people from high school die out. Later in life, a good chunk of your friendships from college will follow the same path. This may seem like a tragedy — you’ll have your memories that you wish you could relive — but it really isn’t. It’s to be expected.

Most formal schooling is not chosen by the student. The setting, the atmosphere, the subjects, and the classmates are all left more or less up to chance. The chance of your parents living in one ZIP code or another, the chance of your last name starting with one letter or another, and the chance of you being born on one date rather than another.

You go about your years in grade school sorted with people who fall into similar ranges of ZIP code and age. You divide further based on your last name and a few characteristics that are more or less arbitrary — like your ability to read at age 5 or your ability to play sports. You may develop real, sincere interests in the years that follow, but you are still stuck around these same groups of people.

As you age, you may be given allowed to “elect” to attend certain classes that reflect your interests. Band, shop, art, or a language class are now open to you. Chances are you’ll bond better with the students in those classes than in your mathematics or your English classes. All that being said, you still do build bonds with people. You find a few friends in the rough. Through all the hormones and the tumultuousness of puberty and public schooling, you find some comrades who hang in there along with you while you all try your hardest to get out.

But here’s the thing about the vast majority of the relationships that you build in school: they’re entirely artificial. These are not real, natural friends because school is not a real, natural environment. (I mean “real” and “natural” in the sense that it evolves from the free choices of free beings — not in a ‘don’t harm Mother Earth’ sense.)

Real, natural friendships are formed based on shared values, mutual interests, and a common respect for a vision of the community you wish to build in your life. When your choices for community are so limited and controlled as they are in school, your options for friendship become limited and distorted.

If you were afforded the freedom and the flexibility of normal human beings during your formative years, you likely would have never associated with these people or even had the chance to associate with them. With the exception of the select few with whom you are friends because of their values, most of these people are friends out of necessity. The pickings are slim, and when they are, you get what you can take.

This isn’t to say that all high school-aged people are sociopaths calculating their way to the top — rather, this happens in good nature. These people are the closest thing to real, natural friends in the fake, unnatural environment that is school.

Once you get to college, you get a little more freedom and flexibility to choose your friends (although less than most people think). Then, you hit the “real” world and you have total freedom relative to your earlier years. You can associate with whom you want. You can spend time with whom you want. You can cut people out of your life at will. Don’t like your coworkers? Quit your job. Don’t like the people in your town? Move. Don’t like your “friends”? Find new friends. The freedom is magnitudes greater than that afforded to a child or a young adult.

Your friendships from high school are dying or dead? College, too?

Rejoice!

You now have the opportunity to build real, lasting friendships based on shared values, mutual beliefs, and fostering a community based on your interests. Take this opportunity and run with it. Build the life that you want — the one that reflects your values.

 

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