But you gotta have friends!

Wikipedia defines "friendship" as "the cooperative and supportive relationship between two or more people." As I have been reading Seneca, specifically his letters on friendship, it seems rather ridiculous that such a complex thing can be defined so dryly. We can see amazing examples not just in humans, but in life and nature all around us. In his letters, Seneca spends a good amount of time talking about friendship and the amount of importance we should or should not place on it. In Letter IX, "The wise man is content with himself and therefore needs no friend." However, he goes on to talk about the kinds of friendships we should invest ourselves in. He spends a lot of time emphasizing the importance of making friends essential to our lives, even though later in the same letter, he says "The wise man, self-sufficient as he is, still desires to have a friend if only for the purpose of practising friendship and ensuring that those talents are not idle." Seneca is not an advocate of being lonely or miserable; rather, he is very realistic about the expectations that we should place on ourselves. We are told our whole lives (or at least I have been taught) to not allow people or circumstances dictate our happiness, but rather to decide our own happiness and make sure that we live our lives our in a way that will provide us with the happiness we wish for.
In "On The Shortness of Life," Seneca writes: "In guarding their fortune men are often closefisted, yet, when it comes to the matter of wasting time, in the case of the one thing in which it is right to be miserly, they show themselves most prodigal. And so I should like to lay hold upon someone from the company of older men and say: “I see that you have reached the farthest limit of human life, you are pressing hard upon your hundredth year, or are even beyond it; come now, recall your life and make a reckoning. Consider how much of your time was taken up with a moneylender, how much with a mistress, how much with a patron, how much with a client, how much in wrangling with your wife, how much in punishing your slaves, how much in rushing about the city on social duties. Add the diseases which we have caused by our own acts, add, too, the time that has lain idle and unused; you will see that you have fewer years to your credit than you count." This prompts a lot of thought into the idea of who we allow into our lives and call a friend. According to Seneca, our time is the most precious thing that we possess, yet it is the thing that we are the most willing to give away. We should be much more careful with who we allow to take our time away from us, and because of this, we should be extra careful in deciding who is in possession of the majority of our time.
Friendship has always been one of the most important things in my life. My good friends have come and gone and changed over the years, but the importance of my friends in my life has never changed. I cherish my few close friendships more than anything in the world, but I also somewhat understand and agree with Seneca's opinion that a wise man is content with himself. In Letter IX, he says, "Self-contented as he is, then, he does need friends - and wants as many of them as possible - but not to enable him to lead a happy life; this he will have even without friends." It is a good notion that we should learn to be content with our lives even without friends, and that friends simply add something extra to our lives; however, I have seen in my life just how difficult it is to truly be without friends. Seneca encourages us to evaluate our lives, our time, our day, and our belongings, but perhaps we should also evaluate our true happiness aside from our cherished friendships. I think we would find that most of what we consider to be our "true" happiness lies in the people that we surround ourselves with. It seems as though, for most people, myself included, if friends were removed from their lives they would not know how to function. And after reading Seneca's ideas, I wonder how good of a thing this is. Should we be so attached to the people in our lives that we cannot even function or be happy without them? Seneca would say no. We should be perfectly content on our own.
But I say that friends are essential to life. They are who we depend on to help us with problems, guide us through crises, celebrate with us, cry with us, and spend time with us in general. God made mankind for a reason, and he gave us the feelings and emotions that we have for a reason, including the place that we have in our heart for relationships. Because of this, we are supposed to have friendships and invest ourselves in other people. The feeling of friendship is something that is innate in all of us, from the time we are children and find that one person that we want to play on the playground with. Our human nature itself needs friendship. In my opinion, Seneca's ideas about this are only half-right. I believe that we should not allow people or circumstances to dictate our true happiness, but it is definitely essential to our quality of life to have friends to walk through life with. Studies have even shown that friends play a major role in our physical and mental health. It has been proven that human touch and connection is vital to our lives and well-being, as those studied who have not had these things either died or had otherwise tragic lives. We also must change our view on life in order to have good friends and be a good friend. When we are involved in any kind of relationship with a person, our thoughts should shift from "me" to "we." If we form these relationships with people whom we have judged to be good friends to us and whom we have decided to trust, according to Seneca, we will have successful friendships that will truly positively add to our lives. Our lives are short; why waste them with people who don't uplift us and who add to the quality of our life?