“The Five People You Spend the Most Time With”: How Do You Choose?

Your friends reveal your values

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“You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”

Like many Internet quotes, the above is popular in self-help circles, despite an iffy provenance.

It’s also loaded with confusing baggage: Is it mathematically possible to be the average of the five people we spend the most time with? What about our influence on them? Do family members count, or is this just for friends? What if I spend most of my time with my orange tabby cat?

There is some obvious wisdom here: Since the people we spend the most time with influence us most, we’d be wise to be careful who we allow those people to be. But there also lurks a pitfall.

This kind of glib mantra risks commodifying our friends by trying to “optimize” them. The clinical wording can easily be interpreted as, “How will this person help me be richer or happier?” instead of, “How can I be a better friend?”

I speak not of abusers, moochers, ingrates, or sociopathic family members you should run from as you would a deadly zoonotic disease. I speak of something more complicated: choosing the people in your life based on what success and goodness mean to you. Take, for example, my uncle and his…