1, #68 - The False Promise of the Inner Circle
On Friendship — Estimated Read Time: 55 seconds.
What’s a group you wish you were part of?
Not official ones. I mean the informal circles: the colleagues who get looped in for key conversations, the friends who get invited to everything, the people in the room where it happens.
In 1944, CS Lewis told a group of university students that, “one of the most dominant elements is the desire to be inside the local Ring and the terror of being left outside.” He continues on to say that “Unless you take measures to prevent it, this desire is going to be one of the chief motives of your life, from the first day on which you enter your profession until the day when you are too old to care.”
The problem? This pursuit is inherently flawed:
“It is the very mark of a perverse desire that it seeks what is not to be had …. As long as you are governed by that [desire to be inside the invisible line] you will never get what you want. You are trying to peel an onion: if you succeed there will be nothing left.”
So, what’s the alternative? Well, Lewis proposes a few, but here’s the one that stood out to me: the simple friendship of “people who like one another meeting to do things that they like.” This, Lewis says, “causes perhaps half of all the happiness in the world, and no Inner Ring can ever have it.”
Insight inspired by: CS Lewis and his fascinating talk, “The Inner Ring.”
Well done and timeless
I don’t want to belong to any club that would have me as a member. - Groucho Marx