People, if you ask most people, are you a good friend, most people will say yes.

And then you start scratching the surface.

So would you cancel on a friend for a work meeting?

Would you cancel a work meeting for a friend?

Well, my friends would understand.

That's why we cancel on them.

If you have a friend who's depressed, do you try and fix them?

Do you try and point out that they're doing fine, to snap out of it?

Or do you go sit in bed with them all day and be depressed with them?

Just sit in mud with them, just so they don't feel alone.

And you start going down the line, you realize most of us are pretty bad friends.

And friendship, for it to work, has to be intentional.

Making a friend is organic.

As human beings, we know how to, by accident, make friends.

But to maintain friendship actually requires a lot of work.

And again, the analogy is a relationship.

Like, going on a fun date and being attracted to someone, it kind of just happens.

But the relationship actually requires work.

And we talk about that, like, duh, go to work.

But we don't talk about working on friendship.

And people who have good friendships, have intentional friendship, they're actually healthier.

They actually live longer.

They are better capable at managing stress.

I'll give you just a quick...

So, our... and you know more about this than I do, but our basic understanding of addiction comes from an experiment that was done, like, in the 50s or 60s, where they took a rat and put it in a cage, and it had plain water and had water laced with drugs.

It tried both of them, preferred the one with drugs, got addicted to the point where it died.

And our understanding of addiction largely comes from this experiment, right?

A few years ago, a guy by the name of, I think his name was Bruce Alexander, made a realization that the experiment was flawed.

Because rats, like us, are social animals.

And we put a rat in a cage by itself and left it alone, and of course it became addicted.

So he redid the experiment as in a social context, where he put many rats in a cage.

And he put fun things to do, and mazes and wheels.

And they put two things of water, one laced with drugs and one plain.

They tried both.

They tried the one laced with drugs enough to get addicted.

And if you look at the data, the one with drugs, the usage goes down.

Which means, if you have friends, you're actually less likely to form addiction.

When you're alone, you're more likely to form addiction.

Which starts to raise some interesting questions, because we're all over social media and cell phones right now for being addicted.

And they are addictive.

They are dopamine producing devices and things that absolutely can produce addiction.

But is it the addiction that's making us lonely, or is it the loneliness that's opening us up to addiction?

And I would argue that we're not teaching our children how to make friends.

In fact, as parents, we don't create environments to force them to be friends.

How many parents take the phones away from all the kids when they have a play date, and call the parents and say, if you need your kid, call me?

Zero is probably the answer.

Or a negligible number.

And then so, maybe the kids are more susceptible to addiction because they don't have friends.

Just a thought.