More Friends, More Burdens

From childhood, our teachers and elders taught us that the more friends one has, the more roads one has, encouraging us to make friends widely. From certain angles, such a view is not wrong. But from another angle, more friends also mean more burdens; fewer social contacts mean far fewer worries.

Do human beings need friends? Of course, for living alone is too lonely. But once friends reach a certain number, they can easily be overwhelming. Socializing is both tiring to the mind and costly to the pocket. What is more unpleasant is that if the circle of friends is too complex, as we exchange with them we pick up all sorts of bad emotions and habits, ending up anxious, restless, and flighty. As long as one's heart is at peace, living apart from the crowd can be far lighter and freer.

I am habitually regarded by those around me as eccentric and unsociable, so much so that when my wife drags me along to some celebration of her colleagues, they look at me with the amazed expression of having discovered an alien, and even say to my face: "Zhou Zhiyuan, you actually came out today; that really is something," as though suspecting the sun had risen in the west that day.

Usually in such cases I first offer a Mona Lisa smile, then maintain an unfathomable silence, so as to preserve my eccentric image in their eyes. After all, this label has become my personal brand; maintaining this personal brand can fend off a lot of unnecessary trouble—for example, Aunt Zhang suddenly asking me one day to ghostwrite an article for her, or Uncle Li asking me to help devise some pretext to deal with a stubborn child in his family. These are things I really do not want to do.

Actually, as a child I was very sweet-talking, greeting everyone I saw; while my mother was alive she called me a "sweet-talking mouth." Even now my personality is not eccentric; I am perfectly capable of handling relationships, and have no psychological ailments like agoraphobia or social anxiety.

To blow my own horn a little: people who practice medicine are the best relationship-handlers in the world. Ordinary people handle simple relationships—nods and bows keep them in good repair. But doctors handle very complex relationships; every day they face crowds of people in bad moods, and patients' emotions toward doctors are complex and volatile. In this age of frequent doctor-patient disputes, one slip and the doctor can be beaten to a pulp by the patient or family member who was respectful just a moment before.

So, as a joke, you can tell from my intact teeth and unscarred skin that I can still handle this professionally complex social work. All this talk is simply to prove that my avoiding socializing is not that I cannot, but that I choose not to. Proof complete, identity verified; now you may take me to the execution ground, haha.

According to some anthropologists, if a person makes more than 150 acquaintances in a lifetime, those acquaintances will begin to exert a negative influence on him. In today's society, where connections are prized everywhere, many people make more than 150 acquaintances in a single year. Businesspeople, politicians, and salespeople in particular must deal with thousands upon thousands of people; of course we doctors are no exception, and so their lives too become exhausted because of it.

The friends I have kept long-term can be counted on one hand—including my teachers and mentors, no more than five. Even loosening the standard and counting some old friends we know well but rarely see, I cannot get past ten. But once these friends are made, they are no casual acquaintances; though I dare not exaggerate that we share life and death, the relationships are indeed as close as siblings and unwavering through life and death—the diehard buddies of legend.

So people all say I am eccentric, and this evaluation is not wrong. I think I am probably the kind of person who can share everything with friends, except time and women, which cannot be shared with others. Especially after thirty, having realized that life truly flies by like a white horse glimpsed through a crack, while there is still so much I want to do, it seems the time of this lifetime is far from enough.

So, stranger, when we chance to meet in reality and shake hands and say "let's be friends," dear, when I give that Mona Lisa smile upon hearing such words, I am not saying "yes, alright," but rather "let's skip it!"