One May Smile and Smile and Be a Villain

By Broadside Opinion Columnist Brandon Cosby

They are your confidants. They are your shoulders to cry on. They call themselves your friends, but when does a friend become something less? There's something frightening happening as our friendships mature through school and reach that post-high school level. Enamored by the idea that we might now be adults, we believe that we can do more adult things and consequences matter less. And the changing times have just fueled the notion more.

We see relationships, friendship or otherwise, as disposable. They become fleeting for some and easily replaced. After all, we do go to a school with a student body of 30,000—there will always be someone new.

There’s a callousness and aloofness in the air. We seem to care less about people and their dignity—lying to them and throwing decency to the wind. This is a dangerous trend. While deception and selfishness are not a recent revelation in human history, we have reached a ridiculous point in our society where no one seems to give a second's thought to someone else.

It’s become about the self. Self-gratification. Self-interests. Self-respect—not someone else’s. We make our friendships temporary and our relationships even more half-lived. If a guy comes between you and your best friend — go for the guy. You'll find another best friend, but you may never find another guy as hot as this one. That seems to be the prevailing mindset among some today.

I’m not asking for the world to be handled with kitten gloves, though. I’m not saying that we should all just “get along.” I’m saying that we are smarter than this. The fact that some people possess in them the ability to lie and scheme and backstab for completely petty reasons — another guy, a better place on campus, a better job — is nothing new. But it seems to be happening more often. And when you start treating people with such casual dismissal, you deny a bit of them as people.

We have befriended people who will turn on you for another girl. We have started calling people our boyfriend when they will just as soon cheat and lie to us for someone younger and prettier. We do this not because the other person has done something wrong, but because we see something better and say, “that’d be more fun.” Consequence never figures in one tiniest bit.

But instead of mustering the strength to say no, we press on and ignore that ever-fainter voice of reason inside that says maybe this isn’t the smartest idea.

What’s more, our friends and relationships seem to have grown less important in the age of impersonal social networking and scores of Facebook friends. We put up a digital barrier around friends and they become more like strangers as a result. We never sit down and get to know these people; instead we just take pride in saying that we “know” that many.

Now I’ll be accused of preaching. I’ll be accused of piety, arrogance and condescension. It’s none of those. This isn’t a buttering-up of a small gripe into a 900-word article. This is true and we all know it. We simply don’t care about most people anymore because we see them as replaceable or unimportant.

But we must always remember that these people aren’t just friends—disposable or not. These are people here, with an inherent dignity and deserving of a modicum of respect.
But what consequences will this have if we continue such a dangerous trend into our truly adult lives? Will we continue to knock people just for the pettiest advantage? Will we continue to deceive those we supposedly are about because a lie is easier than the truth? Will we smile and smile to their faces while plotting the quickest way to take them down?

Maybe we will. Cutthroat tactics have never been foreign in the business world, so perhaps we’ll be better prepared. But it is what we continue to do in our personal lives that worries me more. This trend will only lead to a world of strangers—all of us holding dozens of acquaintances we hardly know and will feel no remorse when circumstance forces us to betray them. We'll grow up alone and remorseless because to our future selves—it'll be like we haven't hurt anyone important at all.

As it stands, there’s little we can do to change this. There are no magical four words or grand revelations that’ll suddenly make everyone snap out of it. These are hard problems to overcome and difficult habits to break. But the reverse—ignoring them and continuing on with our often-selfish ways—will make things even harder. Perhaps it’d be best to remember one simple thing—no matter how much you may dislike a person, or no matter how much a person stands in your way to something—they are still a person and deserving of a little understanding.

But that’s the future and this is now. We’re at a shift in how we see people and relate to them thanks to surging advances in technology. Social networking has completely changed how we interact and communicate with people in such a short time. Perhaps it’s also changed how we view them. They seem less important now, less tangible. And maybe that’s why we find it so easy to turn on them.

But as it stands, we have become Generation K — the Kleenex generation. We treat people as disposable and when something comes along that’s better, we go for it. Not because it’s the only way, but because it’s easier. We cannot form affecting relationships or muster any form of empathy, we just do what’s in our best interests — the other person be damned.