For those of you who’ve watched older Disney movies – remember the beginning of 101 Dalmatians (the cartoon, not the live action remake) where Pongo is watching the women outside walking their dogs?
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Yeah, them. The women and their dogs look damn near identical.
Yes, I know it’s a cartoon and an over-exaggeration, but tell me you’ve never seen something like that in real life.
That’s what I thought.
Spend enough time with someone, and some of them is going to rub off on you. And some of you will rub off on them too. It’s why your mom always told you not to spend time with that kid at school who was always in trouble. It’s why you see old couples who look and act frighteningly similar despite being unrelated by blood (at least you hope they are). And it’s why when you get older and have kids, you catch things your dad said to you as a kid coming out of your mouth.
“I will turn this car around RIGHT NOW!”
We can’t help it. And since you’re all grown up now and mommy can’t tell you to stop hanging out with bad boys, you’re going to have to start watching yourself. Because that shit sneaks up on you.
“You are what you eat”
No, I’m not suggesting you’re a cannibal, and even if you are, that’s not what I mean. It’s just a very handy analogy.
The statement is true in two ways – you’ll get healthy if all you eat is healthy food, and if you tend to eat healthy food, you’re probably healthy already. We eat what we are and we are what we eat.
The same thing goes for the people we hang out with – we hang out with people who are like us, and we start to become like the people we hang out with. (Though I can’t explain crazy cat ladies this way. It’s not like they have crazy cat lady clubs or anything… anyway, back on topic.)
So, why do I care who you hang out with?
Honestly, I don’t. Go join a cult where the members drink each other’s blood or start stealing your neighbors’ lawn gnomes with your kids every Saturday night. It doesn’t matter to me. Your real question should be -
Why should YOU care who you hang out with?
There are a couple of reasons for this, so even if you think the people you spend time with are good people and don’t mind them rubbing off on you, keep reading.
1. Who you choose spend time with says a lot about who you are.
Yes, people will judge you for spending time with worthless wastes of space, but that’s not what’s really important. Let’s go a little deeper.
Take a look at the people you surround yourself with. Are they who you want to be? I hope so, because chances are, you’re a lot alike. More alike than you realize.
It’s hard to look at yourself and make an honest judgement about who you are as a person. We tend to be blind to our own faults, but are much more aware of the faults of others. That’s why it’s much easier to look at your friend and make an honest judgement about who THEY are. Go on, judge your friends, right now as a matter of fact. You know you want to.
But here’s the kicker: now take that judgement and apply it to yourself. If you surround yourself with drug addicts, you’re probably a drug addict, too. Sorry.
2. Who you spend time with is a preview of who you’re going to become
There’s a small chance that during my previous point, you could honestly say that you aren’t exactly like the friend or friends I had you judging. You may have been able to look around at your drug addict friends while you’re clean and sober and gainfully employed and say “I’m better than these people.”
Don’t pat yourself on the back just yet.
If you keep hanging out with these people, you’re probably going to turn into them if you haven’t already. Sorry again.
3. If there’s something about yourself you want to change, go find people already like that and hang out with them
This is probably the most useful thing I have to say to you, and the simplest.
Want to quit smoking? Go find a group of friends that don’t smoke.
Want to start eating healthy? Go out to eat with your friends who eat well, and stay away from the fast food fiends at mealtime.
You don’t have to ditch your current friends; just find some new ones too.
And no, I don’t mean online friends. Real friends. There’s no salad bar or non-smoking section in Farm Town.
But what if I’m stuck with these people?
After all, we rarely get to choose our coworkers and neighbors, and we almost never get to pick our family members; we’re stuck with our parents and our kids and that obnoxious man who shares an office with us. There are some people you just can’t choose NOT to be around.
If that’s the case, just try to keep all that crap I said before in mind. Check in with yourself to make sure you haven’t picked up any of their bad habits or manners or some of those rude phrases they use. It may not completely protect you, but it’ll help.
In short – look at the people around you to see who YOU really are or who you’re going to be, get rid of the people you don’t want to become, hang out with who you want to be, and make sure you don’t turn into that deadbeat brother you just can’t get rid of.
That’s it! Now it’s your turn. Any advice, questions, funny stories? Funny pictures of couples who’ve turned into twins? Please, share!
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Hi Pam,
Would love it if you could comment on the following issues:
(1) What do you think of using indirect contact to establish positive “social influences”, while reducing direct “social influence” from negative friends. For example, a person who admires the leadership skills and motivation of Nelson Mandela could try to seek out Mendela’s works, and articles about him, and information about his leadership skills and philosophy.
(2) In the light of choosing who one should hang around with, one should definitely take some time to sit back, and truly think about what one wants in live, then seek out the key “role models”. Using these key “role models” as a start up, then go and seek real friends to provide the real interaction.
I hope you would view the above 2 as separate instances, as the first one suggests pure indirect influence, and the second one suggests using indirect influence to find direct influence.
Thanks!
Horm – Thanks for commenting and taking the time to expand on the concepts I talked about in this post. I’ll take the points you made one at a time –
(1) I don’t think that indirect influence would work in the way that I talked about in the post. When writing this post, I had in mind the way that the people around you rub off on you in ways that you may not even notice – it’s more of a subconscious thing. While it could certainly be beneficial to research and learn about positive role models that you would never get the chance to interact with in real life, it’s not the same as daily interaction. Those positive role models wouldn’t “rub off” on you through research; you would have to make an active effort to emulate them.
(2) I’m not quite sure of the point you’re trying to make here, or the question that you’re asking. Do you mean to find out who your ideal positive role models are (in your example, Nelson Mandela) and then find people in real life who share the same qualities? If that’s what you mean, I think this would be an excellent idea. It would be a good way to absorb the qualities you admire in other people in order to achieve your goals or improve your life. But the people you chose would have to be people you would spend time with on a regular basis; otherwise, they wouldn’t get the chance to rub off on you.
Hi Pam, Good post. I think your view is valid for folks with a good social self-image. As for those of us that have social anxiety in addition to our depression, it can be tough to keep the few friends we already have much less make new friends with people we find have personality attributes we want to be exposed to. Depressive symptoms can be tolerated by very few people unless they too are depressed and then I have to ask why would I want to be exposed to their depression if its going to rub off on me. Also, I think men tend to see mental instability as a weakness, something they don’t want anything to do with. This makes it that much more difficult for men that suffer from depressive symptoms to make new friends unless those new friends have a good understanding of what depressive symptoms are all about.