Don’t Be This Kind of Friend

0:00I'm recording this on a Monday, and Monday is our grocery store day in our family. I usually pick my kids up from school and we go over to Whole Foods, get all our groceries for the week. Although here very shortly, we're going to go over there to get our Thanksgiving turkey because they've got a bunch of great options. Turkeys start at$1.49 a pound if you have Prime with organic birds at$2.99 a pound. And they only carry no antibiotic ever turkeys that will bring quality to your table at a great price. Whole Foods has great everyday prices on all your Thanksgiving essentials, whether you celebrate with a massive family or just a few close friends.

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1:40Don't be this kind of friend. They've always been with us. They were there in Nero's court, telling the king what he wanted to hear. They were there in the slave quarters too, as Epictetus would have known. notions of solidarity being tossed aside for an extra scrap of food or slightly better treatment. Seneca would have known them in his literary salons, too. It's rare to see Marcus Aurelius get as specific or as judgmental as he does in Meditations 1115, when he talks about despicable phoniness, which he calls a knife in the back. We've all known these people. They do one thing and say another.

2:21they virtue signal but act without virtue. They are, as Taylor Swift sings, vipers dressed in empaths clothing. But it's important that we understand when Marcus Aurelius is saying that false friendship is the worst and that we must avoid at all costs, he's not saying that we can get through life without experiencing false friendship. That's unavoidable. What he is saying is that we make sure that we aren't false friends. Remember, we don't control what other people do, whether they lie to our faces or stab us in the back. We don't control other people's hypocrisies or their vulnerabilities. We do, however, control who we are.

3:03We control how we treat others. We control what kind of friend we are.

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