Review

Books

Culture

Friendship

9 May 2023

6 min read

Why do we ignore the power of friendship

Elizabeth Day’s Friendaholic: Confessions of a Friendship Addict.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen.

A large group of friends sit at a crowded table and share a meal together.

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

Elizabeth Day is a journalist, a novelist, a podcast host, a broadcaster, and a friendaholic. This isn’t a term that she uses lightly, she’s not merely delighting in some quaint wordplay here. Rather, Elizabeth has identified within herself a chronic compulsion, a psychological need, a habitual seeking out, and an emotional reliance on friendship (or, at least, what she perceived friendship to be – more on that later…)

Therefore, when she labels herself a friendship addict, she does so with every ounce of seriousness. She also describes the symptoms of her addiction with impressive levels of introspection.

‘I would get a buzz from a moment of exchange; a hit of pure friendship adrenaline. In that moment, I would feel worthwhile and liked and accepted. I wanted more of it. Then I needed more of it. Then it became something that I relied on for my own self-worth. I must be OK, the reasoning went, I’ve got so many friends.’

These intimate confessions lead Elizabeth to begin the epilogue of her book with a familiar, albeit reconfigured, turn of phrase: ‘My name is Elizabeth Day’ she writes, ‘and I’m a recovering friendaholic.’

The quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health.

Elizabeth pre-empts any criticism of what could be perceived as a ‘woe-is-me’ memoir by meeting those who may be reaching for their ‘metaphorical tiny violins’ head on. This book unashamedly takes the impact of friendship, or a lack thereof, very seriously. And so should we. Afterall, social injuries are proven to be very real and loneliness a serious determinant of health. On the opposite end of the same scale, ‘social burnouts’, which often lead to social anxiety, are becoming an epidemic, while an increasing number of mental health issues are being accredited to the profound impact of ‘toxic’ friendships. In short, it is becoming common knowledge among researchers that the quality of our social life, whether it be too large or too small, has a significant impact on our mental, emotional and physical health.

And yet, despite this - we have barely any language with which to adequately address or inspect the topic of a ‘social life’. It seems that generation after generation, we have failed to take the art of friendship seriously.

‘Friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value.’

C.S. Lewis

Considering the psychology, this seems non-sensical. Why would this be?

It could be a symptom of individualism; the emphasis that our Western society places on individual success, personal goal setting and the virtue of independence. Maybe it has more to do with our inclination toward all things productive, and, to (partly) quote C.S Lewis, ‘friendship is unnecessary, like philosophy, like art.... It has no survival value’. The other explanation could be our pre-occupation with romantic relationships, and the habit we have of idolising them over and above all other social attachments. In her book, Notes on Love, Lauren Windle powerfully reflects on this, she writes

‘maybe it’s time to stop looking for a partner who is also my ‘best friend’ and start appreciating my best friends. Maybe it’s time to stop feeling bereft of true love and realise that I already experience it. Every day.’

Whatever the reason(s) may be, we have neglected to take seriously the science of the social life, and the results of such an oversight are encapsulated in Elizabeth Day’s self-diagnosed ‘friendship addiction’, and the book that has documented it.

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life.

Elizabeth talks us through her most formative of friendships - the long-standing and the fleeting, the nourishing and the draining, the durable and the fragile – this book is an ode to them all. She introduces us to her ghosts of friendship past and present (although, once they read of their appearance in this strikingly honest book, I do worry that a couple of her friends may slip from the latter into the former category), and does so in a way that makes you, as the reader, instinctively close the book for a moment and indulge the continual urge to reflect on the mosaic of people who have entered and exited your own life.

Elizabeth places her personal life on the altar in this book, she sacrifices the privacy of her emotional life for the purpose of speaking with powerful candour. She tells the intimate stories of how her addiction came to be, and how she has sought to feed her need for a thriving social life at her own expense. Elizabeth has offered herself up as a case-study of what inevitably happens when we don’t have the tools, the maps, or even the language with which to engage with the subject of friendship. As it turns out, friendship – the real kind – was not what she was addicted to, nor was it what she was accumulating. Rather, it was approval. It was the self-worth that she drew from the affirmation of others. If we, as a society, ensured that we were more socially-literate, perhaps Elizabeth could have identified the difference much sooner. Perhaps we all could.

As well as telling her own stories, Elizabeth weaves together insights from psychology, philosophy, history, and the experiences of others in differing contexts. This ensures that as many people as possible are able to find themselves in the pages of this book. And, as a result, I found Friendaholic to be the book that I didn’t know I had been missing.

It’s funny. It’s emotive. It’s generous. It’s honest. And it’s refreshingly serious about friendship. I recommend it heartily.

Nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love.

There’s just one thing that felt missing, one insight that I instinctively began to fill any gaps with. I found myself willing Elizabeth to take a biblical route (totally unfairly, I should add, as she doesn’t identify as a Christian, nor does she claim this to be a book of any religious inclination).

I wanted her to explore the Bible, because in it, she would find an abundance of evidence for almost every point she felt compelled to make. Friendship soaks the pages of the Christian Bible.

Friendaholic quotes Jesus in its very first chapter, making reference to his declaration that ‘greater love has no one than this, that someone lay his life down for his friends’, but then never picks this astonishing claim, nor the history-altering man that it came from, up again (once again- this is no criticism, if it were, it would be a mightily unfair one). The platonic love that Elizabeth takes so seriously, and that our culture doesn’t take nearly seriously enough, is claimed to be the ‘greater’ love by Jesus, who subsequently kick-started a movement which was defined by this kind of love. Friendship was weaved into the earliest expressions of what we now call Christianity/the church. Jesus’ words were, and still are, lived out with astonishing impact.

This is not to say that Christians always perceive or do friendship perfectly. On the contrary, nobody is totally immune to cultural individualism, the idol of productivity, nor the heroizing of romantic love. Indeed, the afore mentioned quote by Lauren Windle has been taken from a book where she tells the story of ‘being single in a marriage obsessed church’.

It’s for this reason that I so enjoyed Elizabeth’s offering. Friendaholic felt like a literary dusting brush, brushing aside generations worth of dirt from a long-neglected jewel; the jewel being real, true, and deep friendship. The kind of friendship that is as integral to our health as food and shelter, the kind that was included in the original blueprint for human flourishing, the kind that is both dramatically underrated, and yet greater than all other human loves.

You can take it from an ancient book, or Elizabeth Day’s brand new one – as it turns out, they will tell you the exact same thing.

Article

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

Weirdness

Zombies

24 October 2024

5 min read

Zombies: a philosopher's guide to the purpose-driven undead

Don’t dismiss zombiecore as lowbrow.

Ryan Stark

Ryan is the author of A Guidebook to Monsters: Philosophy, Religion, and the Paranormal.

A regency woman dabs her mouth with a bloody hankerchief.

Lilly James in Pride and Prejudice and Zombies.

Lionsgate.

Writing from his new book, A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan Stark delves into humanity’s fascination for all things monsterous. In the second of a two-part series, he asks what and where zombies remind us of, and why they caught the eyes of C.S. Lewis and Salvador Dali

On how Frankenstein’s monster came to life nobody knows for sure, but he is more urbane than zombies tend to be. Nor do Jewish golems and Frosty the Snowman count as zombiecore. The latter sings too much, and both are wrongly formulated. Frosty comes from snow, obviously, and the golems—from mere loam, not what the Renaissance playwrights call “gilded loam,” that is, already pre-assembled bodies, which is a zombie requirement. Tolkien’s orcs function likewise as golem-esque monsters, cast from miry clay and then enlivened by the grim magic of Mordor. We do not, for instance, discover scenes with orc children.

And neither is Pinocchio a zombie, nor Pris from Blade Runner, but dolls, automatons, and C3POs border upon the land of zombies insofar as they all carry a non-human tint. Zombies, however, carry something else as well, a history of personhood, and so in their present form appear as macabre parodies of the human condition writ large. They are gruesome undead doppelgangers, reminding us of who we are not and perhaps—too—of where we are not. Hell is a place prepared for the Devil and his angels, Christ tells us in the book of Matthew. And maybe, subsequently, for zombies.

Kolchak, in an episode of Kolchak: The Night Stalker aptly titled “The Zombie,” correctly discerns the grim scenario at hand: “He, sir, is from Hell itself!”

C.S. Lewis pursues a similar line of thinking in The Problem of Pain: “You will remember that in the parable, the saved go to a place prepared for them, while the damned go to a place never made for men at all. To enter Heaven is to become more human than you ever succeeded in being on earth; to enter Hell is to be banished from humanity. What is cast (or casts itself) into Hell is not a man: it is ‘remains.’” Lewis makes an intriguing point, which has as its crescendo the now-famous line about the doors of Hell: “I willingly believe that the damned are, in one sense, successful, rebels to the end; that the doors of Hell are locked on the inside by zombies.” I added that last part about zombies.

I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration.

Not everyone believes in Hell, of course, yet most concede that some people behave worse than others, which also helps our cause. Indeed, part of zombiecore’s wisdom is to show that bad people often produce more horror than the zombies themselves. Such is the character of Legendre Murder, a case in point from the film White Zombie. Not fortunate in name, Mr. Murder runs a dark satanic mill populated by hordes of zombie workers, which is the film’s heavy-handed critique of sociopathic industrialization. The truth to be gleaned, here, is that zombies did not invent the multinational corporation; rather, they fell prey to it.

We might think, too, of Herman Melville’s dehumanized characters from Bartleby the Scrivener: Nippers, Turkey, Ginger Nut, and the other functionaries whose nicknames themselves indicate the functions. From an economic standpoint, their value becomes a matter of utility, not essence, which is Melville’s reproach of the despairingly corporate drive to objectify personhood—of which zombies are an example beyond the pale. They might as well be fleshy mannequins, in fact, and as such provide the perfect foil for the human being properly conceived.

Here, then, is why we do not blame zombies for eating brains, nor do we hold them accountable for wearing white pants after Labor Day, as some inevitably do. They cannot help it—in ethics and in fashion. Perhaps especially in fashion. The best we can hope for in the realm of zombie couture is Solomon Grundy, the quasi-zombie supervillain who holds up his frayed pants with a frayed rope, a fashion victory to be sure, however small it might be, though “zombie fashion” is a misnomer in the final analysis. They wear clothes, but not for the same reasons we do.

The point holds true for Salvador Dali’s zombies as well, most of whom find themselves in nice dresses. I make this point—in part—to correct those in the cognoscenti who dismiss zombies as a subject too lowbrow for serious consideration. Not so. Exhibit A: the avant-garde Dali, darling of the highbrow, or at least still of the middlebrow, now that his paintings appear on t-shirts and coffee mugs. Burning giraffe. Mirage. Woman with Head of Roses. All zombies, too ramshackle and emaciated to live, never mind the missing head on the last one, and yet there they are posed for the leering eye, not unlike those heroin-chic supermodels from Vogue magazine in the late 1990s. Necrophilia never looked so stylish.

The zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity...

But never let it be said that zombies are lazy. They are tired, to be sure. Their ragged countenances tell us this, but they are not indolent. Zombies live purpose-driven undead lives. They want to eat brains, or any human flesh, depending on the mythos, and their calendars are organized accordingly. No naps. No swimming lessons. Just brains.

But we quickly discern that no amount of flesh will satisfy. There is always one more hapless minimart clerk to ambush, one more sorority girl in bunny slippers to chase down the corridor. In this way, the zombie’s gloomy predicament bears a striking resemblance to that of the Danaids in the classical underworld, those sisters condemned to fill a sieve with water for all eternity, an emblem of the perverse appetite unchecked, which has at its core the irony of insatiable hunger. And as the pleasure becomes less and less, the craving becomes more and more. The law of diminishing returns. So, it is with all vices. The love of money demands more money, and the love of brains, more brains.

And so, in conclusion, a prayer. God bless the obsessive-compulsive internet shoppers, the warehouse workers on unnecessarily tight schedules, and the machine-like managers of the big data algorithms. God bless the students who sedate themselves in order to survive their own educations, taking standardized test after standardized test. And God bless the Emily Griersons of the world, who keep their petrified-boyfriend corpses near them in the bedroom, an emblem of what happens when one tries too mightily to hold on to the past. And God help us, too, when we see in our own reflections a zombie-like affectation, the abyss who stares back at us and falsely claims that we are not the righteousness of God, as Paul says we are in 2 Corinthians. And, finally, Godspeed to Gussie Fink-Nottle from the P.G. Wodehouse sagas: “Many an experienced undertaker would have been deceived by his appearance, and started embalming on sight.”

From A Guidebook to Monsters, Ryan J. Stark. Used by permission of Wipf and Stock Publishers.