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

Like many quotes on the Internet, the above is very popular in self-help circles despite having 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 talking about friends? What if I spend most of my time with my orange tabby cat?

Perhaps its contrarianism is the reason it keeps resurfacing to spark debates. On one hand, the people we spend time with affect our mood and mentality so we would be wise to be careful who we allow those people to be. On the other hand, a simple shorthand like this can commodify and even degrade people: it encourages us to think about others in terms of “Will this person help me become smarter or launch my 1-person business faster?”, not, “Who is this person and what can I learn from them?”

Both are valid concerns but first, I want to tell you about my uncle.

An “Unlike-Minded” Friendship

My uncle has been friends with a man we’ll call Jim since they were both in kindergarten. To say they’ve since gone separate paths is an understatement.

My uncle went on to college and then graduate school, before enjoying a long and rewarding career as a social studies high school teacher. He gardens, works with his hands, and travels every year. He lives close to his immediate family and enjoys meaningful relationships with multiple people.

Jim, on the other hand, has no family to lean on and has struggled with medical and mental challenges his entire life. He has the emotional capacity of a fourteen-year-old and he needs medication or else he becomes paranoid and violent. His health issues eventually led to Jim’s kidney failure and living on dialysis in government-funding housing. 

On paper, there is no “benefit” for my uncle to be friends with Jim, yet almost every week he goes to visit him in his dorm room equivalent, often with a pizza in hand (one of the few things that Jim looks forward to in life). Does my uncle do it out of pity? Duty? A sense of personal fulfillment? He never talks about why he’s friends with Jim. His attitude is very matter-of-fact; there’s no question of him doing otherwise.

Some people will praise my uncle’s friendship with Jim as a selfless act (I’m inclined to agree) but plenty of others will scratch their heads. Why would you spend so much time with someone who brings almost nothing to the table? I’m posing this question to you because it’s an important one. Relationships involve people; this makes them more complicated than other “self-improvement” choices like journaling or doing calisthenics. 

The Problem with Oversimplifying Relationships

If you want to be mentally and yes, financially successful in life, it pays to be careful about who you spend time with. “You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with” is not a literal math formula, but a memorable way of expressing this fact.

If all of your friends are heroin addicts you’re fighting an uphill battle to not become one yourself. The same is true of friends who are shoplifters or basement-dwelling agoraphobes. Even if we don’t choose the same habits or lifestyle as them, the people we associate with still impact our physical health. ¹

What if your friends are kind, caring, and fun but still make questionable life choices? Consider how slippery this issue becomes with a statement like the following:

“[Y]ou are the average of the five people you associate with most, so do not underestimate the effects of your pessimistic, unambitious, or disorganized friends. If someone isn’t making you stronger, they’re making you weaker.” ²

The above quote is by the popular author and podcaster Tim Ferriss. I like Ferriss and this is not an indictment against him; he struggled with suicidal depression when he was younger and had to make some hard choices to get to where he is today. I imagine when he wrote that line, he was thinking of his teenage self surrounded by empty, soul-sucking peers. But I think Ferriss would also agree that it’s not always black and white. Not everyone is a perfect package; is it better to choose a friend who’s ambitious or one who is humble? What if the friend makes us strong in some ways, but not in others?

It feels mercenary to pull away from someone who is doing worse in life than you, but who also loves you and puts effort into being a good friend.

Even if we scoured the earth to find individuals who were ambitious and humble and more successful than us (who wanted to be our friend, too), what happens to the people we already spend time with? It feels mercenary to pull away from someone who is doing worse in life than you, but who also loves you and puts effort into being a good friend.

This is why it’s critical to be clear on what your life values are. None of us should breathe the fumes of poisonous people, but beyond that, our choices aren’t as much right or wrong as they are different. My uncle could have chosen to pursue a lucrative side hustle and surround himself with fellow side hustlers while leaving Jim to rot in his dialysis center. Instead, he chose an act of charity (one he doesn’t do for attention or for any other extrinsic reason that I can see).

Because our time and energy are finite, we can’t be friends with all the people we would like to be. There will be trade-offs and if we’re lucky, people of quality will also seek our company as well. Yes, your friends matter. But so do your reasons for cutting ties with them. 

Advice from Kant and Aristotle

I don’t know of a formula that can show us exactly how to make the right friends (and distance ourselves from the wrong ones). But there is some timeless wisdom from two brilliant, long-dead philosophers. Kant, one of the two, came up with the following axiom:

“So act that you treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, always at the same time as an end, never merely as a means.” ³

Note that Kant doesn’t say it’s wrong to treat people as a means (think of bus drivers and bank tellers), only that it’s wrong to treat them merely as a means instead of as the fully-feeling human beings they are.

Good intentions aside, if your attempts to be around better, smarter people make them feel objectified, you’ve failed.

This is a great reminder whether you are making a new relationship or nurturing an old one: do you always see the person as an end? I know what it’s like to be treated merely as a means, and it’s a skin-crawling sensation none of us should ever have to experience. Good intentions aside, if your attempts to be around better, smarter people make them feel objectified, you’ve failed.

Once we’ve made sure we treat everyone as an end, not only as a means, we’re on the right footing to make good friendships – then what?

Aristotle believed that friendships fall into one of the following three categories: utility, pleasure, and virtue. The first of the three, utility, is the type of friendship in which both parties are only friends on the condition that both of them are getting something tangible out of it. The second is similar: both people need to be continually entertained and amused by each other or else the reason for the friendship ceases to exist.

Only the third kind, friendships of virtue, is built to last: this is the type of friendship in which both of you are striving to be the best kind of people you can be, encourage the best in each other, and want the best for each other. Aristotle notes: “But those who wish for the good things for their friends, for their friends’ sake, are friends most of all, since they are disposed in this way in themselves and not incidentally.” ⁴

What I think often happens is people confuse friendships of utility with friendships of virtue. We think that to lift ourselves to a higher plane, we need to look for people with attractive and beneficial qualities. But this only works if we are also trying to be the best people we can. 

Some people, like my uncle, aren’t as focused on the “return on investment” in their relationships (and remember, he has plenty of healthy relationships; Jim, on the other hand, has no one else). Others may be more choosy about their friends, and that is their prerogative. What matters for all of us is that together, we and our friends are building each other to be the best versions of ourselves. Otherwise, our motivation is selfish and we’re choosing form over substance. It may seem appealing at first when we’re trying to get ahead in life, but it’s a lonely way to live in the long run.

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Read Next: How to Make “Forever Friends” — According to Aristotle →

1. Pietromonaco, P. R., & Collins, N. L. (2017). Close relationships and health: Implications of attachment theory for health and disease. American Psychologist, 72(6), 531–542.
2. Ferriss, T. (2009). The 4-hour workweek: Escape 9-5, live anywhere, and join the new rich. Harmony.
3. Kant, Immanuel, 1785, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten. Translated as Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals in Kant 1996: 37–108. This simple statement has since come to be known as Kant’s “Formula of Humanity.”
4. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Translated by Robert C. Bartlett and Susan D. Collins. University of Chicago Press, 2012.