Why the Best Friends Tell us What We Least Want to Hear
‘Plato is dear, but dearer still is truth’—a saying that captures Aristotle’s willingness to disagree with his teacher in the pursuit of truth, and his conviction that genuine friendship need never fear honest disagreement.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
What makes a true friend? Aristotle distinguishes friendships of utility, pleasure, and virtue—and explains why the finest friends are so rare.
Today, everyone is obsessed with romantic love. Aristotle, however, conceived of the highest human relationship in terms of friendship—the bond through which we learn to value another person for their own sake.
For the Greeks, true friendship was a rare and precious thing. In Plato’s Lysis, Socrates says, “I would rather have a real friend than all the gold of Darius [the Persian emperor], or even Darius himself.” But today, on social media, we call hundreds of people our friends.
By putting romantic love on a pedestal, we have devalued friendship. Our romantic partner is also expected to be our best friend, confidant, counsellor… As a result, other friendships may be neglected or even treated as threats.
Aristotle’s Three Kinds of Friendship
Friendship is so important to Aristotle’s account of the good life that he devotes two of the ten books of the Nicomachean Ethics to it.
Aristotle famously distinguishes between three kinds of friendship: friendships of utility, friendships of pleasure, and friendships of virtue. In a friendship of utility, we value them for what they can bring us. In a friendship of pleasure, we value them for the enjoyment they provide. These relationships are not necessarily base: colleagues, neighbours, and tennis partners may genuinely like and help one another.
But the limitation of these first two kinds of friendship lies in their reason for being: when the advantage or pleasure fades, the friendship fades with it.
Why Perfect Friends Are Rare
Lasting friendships, on the other hand, are based on character or virtue: each friend values the other, not for what he brings, but for who he is. The friend’s wellbeing and flourishing become part of our own.
Because we are invested in the wellbeing and flourishing of our friend, we owe them the hard truth—and expect the same thing in return. A real friend does not simply accept us as we are, but recognises our potential and helps us become what we could be.
That’s why “perfect friendship”, as Aristotle calls it, is not for everyone. Most people would sooner ghost us than listen to the truth about themselves—particularly now, when there are so many less demanding distractions around. Whereas social media affirms our public image, true friends challenge the person underneath.
Antoine Bourdelle’s Herakles the Archer (1909) captures the Stoic ideal: complete commitment to the action, complete detachment from the outcome.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Whereas depression weighs upon life as it is, anxiety points towards the future: what might happen, what might go wrong, what might be expected of us.
Of course, some concern for the future is necessary. It motivates us to do what’s needed, pay our bills, and avoid danger. So the aim cannot be to abolish anxiety altogether—simply to prevent occasional alarm from becoming a permanent state.
Modern Life
The modern world makes this difficult because threats are seldom all-or-nothing. Our ancestors faced a predator, or did not. We have emails, deadlines, mortgages. And when we look on social media, we feel we are falling behind.
Because the pressure is diffuse and continuous, we internalise it. Eventually, nobody needs to chase us; we carry the pursuer in our head.
Once the pursuer is inside us, we try to outrun them by keeping busy. Activity gives us a sense of control, but often we are not addressing the anxiety so much as preventing ourselves from feeling it. We run faster and faster so that we never have to ask where we are going.
There is a Zen story about a horseman galloping down a path at speed. It seemed as if the rider was on some urgent and vital mission. “Where are you heading?” hollered a bystander. “I don’t know!” came the already distant reply, “Ask the horse!”
How to Reduce Anxiety
The first step, then, is to stop running and name the anxiety. A vague anxiety can fill the whole sky; a named fear becomes one object within it. Once identified, it can be worked with, accepted, or dismissed.
In particular, we can determine what part of the anxiety is actually within our control. The ancient Stoics emphasized this distinction between what is and is not in our control. What is not in our control must simply be let go.
The Stoics had this image of an archer. The archer does all he can to shoot accurately. But once the arrow leaves the bow, its fate is no longer within the archer’s control. So the right-thinking archer focuses on the action, not on its result—because the first is in his control, whereas the other is not.
When dealing with our anxiety, we should all become like the Stoic emperor Marcus Aurelius, who wrote, “Today I escaped anxiety. Or no, I discarded it, because it was within me, in my own perceptions—not outside.”
Before We Hurry to Silence It, We Should Listen to What It Has to Say
If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Grief knows its object. Depression often does not. But that does not mean that depression is always meaningless suffering. Often, it is suffering whose meaning is asking to be discovered.
Still, we must be careful not to romanticise depression. Depression can be a disabling, even deadly, illness. Such depression requires urgent and intensive treatment. But neither should the most severe cases determine how we understand all depression.
Diagnosis
Today, in England, around one person in six is prescribed antidepressants. Numbers on this scale should make us ask: is this all mental illness, that is, a biological disorder of the brain, or is it also a problem with modern life?
If at least some depression arises from a problem of living, then the depression is pointing straight at the problem. By treating it as a biological disorder of the brain, we are hiding the problem and prolonging the pain. Our depression may be telling us, look, something here is seriously wrong, something here has to change, you can’t go on like this.
Treatment
Treatment cannot simply aim at silencing it. If a fire alarm is sounding, disabling the alarm may bring relief—but it does not put out the fire.
Instead, treatment should be more like an exploration and journey. Already in the thirteenth century, Dante gave us the right image. At the beginning of Inferno, he finds himself alone in a dark forest, having lost the straight path. The forest is dark and dangerous. Yet the only way out is through it.
If depression is a journey, recovery cannot always mean returning to the starting place. Because the starting place may have been the problem.
Depression can be an illness, but it can also be a form of intelligence. Before we hurry to silence it, we should listen to what it has to say.
The duck–rabbit: nothing changes but the way of seeing.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
How to think outside the box and have more original ideas.
The word ‘insight’ is sometimes used to mean something like ‘self-awareness’, including awareness of our thought processes, beliefs, desires, emotions, and so on, and of how they relate to one another and to the truth.
Of course, self-awareness comes by types and degrees. Owing to chemical receptors in their tendrils, vining plants know not to coil around themselves, and in that much can be said to have awareness of self and not-self. Infants only begin to develop reflective self-awareness at around 18 months of age, enabling them to recognise themselves in pictures and mirrors.
But insight is also used to mean something like ‘penetrating discernment’: a deep understanding of a person, problem, or situation. Such understanding may emerge gradually, but it can also arrive all at once, with a previously hidden truth—or the solution to a previously intractable problem—suddenly flooding the mind. This sudden apprehension of an insight is sometimes called an epiphany (Greek, ‘manifestation’, ‘coming into the light’), revelation, or ‘aha’ moment.
It is this epiphanic form of insight with which I am principally concerned. Unlike analytical thinking, which proceeds consciously and laboriously from one step to the next, it seems to come from nowhere. One moment, we are staring helplessly at the problem; the next, we can see straight through it. It is rather like climbing a mountain in fog, turning round, and suddenly seeing the entire landscape spread out below.
The Anatomy of Insight
Such ‘aha moments’, epitomised by Archimedes’ cry of Eureka! Eureka! (Greek, ‘I found it! I found it!’), involve a sudden shift in understanding, often by seeing something familiar in a new light or bringing previously disconnected elements together. They carry a characteristic feeling of clarity and conviction, and often delight—though they can also devastate, depending on what has been apprehended.
It is said that, upon sinking into his bath, Archimedes noticed the water level rising and suddenly understood that the volume of water displaced corresponded to the volume of the parts of his body that had been submerged. Less rarefied examples of aha moments include suddenly understanding a joke, or suddenly ‘seeing’ the other aspect of a reversal image such as the duck-rabbit (pictured).
Aha moments, it seems, primarily arise from unconscious and automatic processes, and—you might have noticed—our eyes naturally tend, when mulling over insight problems, to look away from visual stimuli. Brain-imaging studies suggest that this withdrawal of attention, or ‘looking inside’, may be part of the mechanism of insight. By screening out the immediate environment, the mind creates the spare capacity for loose associations to come together. The flash of insight may be sudden, but the work that produces it is not. Indeed, that work may draw upon a lifetime of experience and study.
This helps explain the so-called incubation effect. We wrestle with a problem, reach an impasse, and put it aside—only for the answer to come to us in the shower, on a walk, or upon waking. Had Archimedes not already been wrestling with the problem of measurement, his bath would not have become so famous.
Insight is closely related to intuition. If an intuition is a disposition to believe without conscious deliberation, an epiphanic insight is the sudden apprehension of a previously hidden relation. Intuition may lead to insight, but it can also remain no more than a hunch—rather than a sudden coming together.
Aha moments of the Archimedean kind might be distinguished from uh-oh moments, in which we become aware of an unforeseen problem, and from d’oh moments, popularised by the Simpson patriarch, when a foreseeable but unforeseen problem hits us or we have a flash of insight into our complete lack of insight.
In all three cases, something previously hidden is suddenly revealed, be it an answer, a danger, or our own stupidity.
Although insight often puts us in touch with some truth, there can also be false insights. Insight, therefore, is not exempt from analytical verification. Insight proposes; reason disposes. The highest thinking is not the one or the other, but both together.
The Price of Seeing Differently
‘Thinking outside the box’ is a cognitive feat. When we understand something in a particular way, it is very difficult to apprehend it in any other way, even in the face of the strongest contradictory evidence. It is not merely that we cannot imagine the answer; often, we are trapped inside the wrong question or assumption.
In When Prophecy Fails (1956), the social psychologist Leon Festinger discusses his experience of infiltrating a UFO doomsday cult whose leader had prophesied the end of the world. When the end of the world failed to materialise, most of the cult members dealt with the dissonance that arose from the cognitions ‘the leader said that the world would end’ and ‘the world did not end’ not by ditching the cult or its leader, as you might expect, but by rationalising that the world had been saved by the strength of their faith. Taking their assumptions for facts, the cult members simply reinterpreted the evidence in a way that preserved their existing beliefs.
Very often, to see something in a different light also means to see ourselves and the whole world in that new light, which can threaten and undermine our sense of self and raise atavistic defences. It is more a matter of emotion or self-conception than of reason or intelligence, which explains why even leading scientists can struggle with contravening evidence.
As the physicist Max Planck (d. 1947) observed, ‘A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.’ Or, to put it more pithily, science advances one funeral at a time.
What is true of eminent scientists is true also of us. Our life cannot possibly have been a long list of mistakes. A new insight can demand a new self—which is a higher price than we are willing or able to pay. Younger people, having less to lose, can still afford to be open to ideas—but not for long. By the age of about 22, there is little left of the god in them.
Our attachment to our beliefs is so strong that contravening evidence or attempts to convince us otherwise can in fact entrench them—which is why, as a psychiatrist, I rarely challenge my patients, or indeed anyone, directly. But you don’t have to take my word for it: in a study, supplying ‘corrective information’ to people with serious concerns about the adverse effects of the flu jab made them less willing to receive it. This more than substantiates the German proverb: ‘Never give uninvited advice. The wise won’t need it, the fools won’t heed it.’
Some Insights Into Having Insights
So, short of dissolving our egos, which might take twenty years in a temple, or, ironically, an unusually strong ego, what can we do to increase our cognitive flexibility?
Naturally, it helps to have the tools of thought, including language fluency and multiple frames of reference as given by knowledge and experience. But more important is to develop that first sense of insight—namely, insight as self-awareness.
Self-awareness enables us to distinguish the problem from the assumptions that we have brought to it. At a practical level, we can change the way in which the problem is represented: draw it, explain it aloud, reverse it, reduce it, enlarge it, or translate it into an analogy. More searchingly, we can ask: What am I taking for granted? What would someone from another discipline, culture, or period see here? What if the opposite were true? What am I reluctant to notice because noticing it would cost me something? And how much more is it costing me to be that sort of person?
More benignly, we need to create the time and conditions for thoughts to connect. My own associative thinking is much more active when I’m both well-rested and at rest, for example, standing under the shower or ambling in the park. The very title of this essay came to me while cooking dinner and pouring a glass of wine, after the essay had been written. Jack Welch (d. 2020), as Chairman and CEO of General Electric, spent an hour each day in what he called ‘looking out of the window time’. And August Kekulé (d. 1896) claimed to have discovered the ring structure of the benzene molecule while daydreaming about a snake biting its own tail.
We tend to treat looking out of the window as the opposite of thinking. Often, it is thinking relieved of its supervisor. In my early twenties, as a strategy consultant in Paris, I would get told off for going out for walks. I once responded, ‘How do you expect me to think, locked up in a cubicle?’ (They didn’t like me.) Modern life supplies endless stimulation and very little mental vacancy, leaving us rich in information but poor in opportunities for this information to reorganise itself.
Time is a very strange thing and not at all linear: sometimes, the best way of using it is to waste it.
By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.
Who never ate his bread with tears doesn’t know what life tastes like. —after Goethe
In many cultures, especially for men, crying is considered to be undignified and infantile behaviour, except in certain specific circumstances such as mourning the loss of a relative. After childhood, men shed tears much less frequently than women. The reasons for this are partly biological, but mainly sociocultural.
‘Crying’, or ‘tearing up’, is not just one thing. There are in fact three types of tear, two of which are rather uninteresting: basal tears that lubricate and protect the eye, and reflex tears that flush out irritants such as smoke particles or onion vapours. The third type of tear is, of course, shed in response to emotion.
Crocodile Tears
Whereas many animals have basal and reflex tears, emotional tears appear to be uniquely human. Although other animals, of course, vocalise and express distress, there is no convincing evidence that they shed tears for emotional reasons. So, presumably, if women cry more often than men, it is because they are more human? Elephants and chimpanzees are sometimes said to ‘weep’, but it has not been conclusively demonstrated that these are indeed emotional tears. On the other hand, we can be pretty sure that crocodiles don’t sob. The expression ‘to shed crocodile tears’ has its roots in an ancient legend, according to which crocodiles pretend to weep to either lure or mourn their prey.
What I Remember from Med School
Reflex and emotional tears are produced by the lacrimal gland and drained through the nasolacrimal duct into the nose, which is why we also sniff when we cry. Any excess fluid spills out of the eyelid and trickles along the side of the nose or surface of the cheek, forming teardrops. Damage to the ophthalmic branch of the trigeminal nerve desensitises the cornea, impairing the production of reflex tears. However, it is the parasympathetic division of the facial nerve that is responsible for making tears, and damage to the facial nerve, as in Bell’s palsy, can lead to a decrease in tear production.
Existential Tears
When we think of crying emotional tears, we think of sadness and grief. But we also shed emotional tears in response to a range of other, sometimes positive, emotions and feelings, including elation, laughter, love, frustration, pain, anger, and surprise. We may also cry in response to music, beauty, kindness, yearning, reunion, or anything that strikes us as poignant. What all these instances of crying have in common is not sadness, but significance.
Social Tears
Crying is not merely a private affair. Tears may serve a number of social functions. In particular, they may serve to convey our emotions while emphasising their depth and sincerity; draw attention, sympathy, and assistance at a time of danger, distress, or need; and serve as a signal of appeasement, dependency, or attachment. If someone cries in our presence, it is almost impossible not to be moved, even changed, by that. No surprise, then, that tears can also be used to manipulate and deceive. The younger you are, the better you know this.
Healthy Tears
In ancient and mediaeval times, physicians believed that crying purged excess humours from the body. This idea survives in the modern scientific notion that emotional tears serve to excrete stress-related substances such as ACTH. But the more important purgation is, of course, psychological.
Crying may help us to feel better, in particular, by enabling us to experience, express, and ‘process’ our emotions. In the Poetics, Aristotle argues that tragedy, by arousing emotions such as pity and fear, brings about a catharsis—a purgation or purification—of such emotions. After crying, we may feel not better exactly, but differently: calmer, clearer, more reconciled to life, or simply more certain of who we are and where we stand.
Crying as a Way of Knowing
Emotional tears signal moments that are of existential importance in our lives. They tell us that something matters deeply. Sometimes we know what that something is—the death of a parent, the birth of a child—but at other times our tears seem to know before we do, and to arrive bearing a message.
Imagine that a relationship or friendship has broken down. Three months later, or even three years later, you sit down on a park bench and unexpectedly begin to cry. Those tears tell you something that you may not have known, something that you may have been guarding against: that you still miss the relationship, and that it mattered more than you realised. The tragedy is when the other person also has their park bench moment, but neither of you acts upon it.
Thirty years, gone like that.
We do not always cry because we know what matters to us. Sometimes we know what matters to us because we cry. In this sense, crying can be a way of knowing, revealing deeper truths that reason, thought, and language cannot reach. It sometimes happens that we cry without quite knowing why. When that happens, we should ask ourselves: What does this mean? What is the more refined part of me trying to tell me?
What brings us to tears changes as we change. A child might cry because they are underwhelmed by their Christmas presents. The sadness is real because, at that age, the presents really do matter. As we mature, the objects of our tears change along with our hierarchy of values. We cry less at the frustration of our immediate desires, and more at an unexpected kindness, a beautiful landscape, a piece of music, an abstract value like dignity or freedom, or the human condition.
We cry for our ex not merely because we can’t have them, but because they can’t have us.
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