What Is True Friendship?

One sentence that sums up true friendship: don't do to others what you wouldn't want done to you; whatever you want for yourself, want it for others too.

But this is very far from us. Every advertisement says "if you want to feel good, you need to buy this"; none of them says that thinking of someone else will make a person happy. We've drifted so far that we don't even feel the lack; we try to fill the void with material things. The mind of the five-year-old who looks at a friend's toy ferry and says "why don't I have one" stays the same when they grow up and become a rich businessman; only the toy gets bigger.

True friendship is such that a person doesn't feel themselves among friends; they're inside the feeling of the bond between them. As a child, playing football with your friends in the neighborhood, you weren't even aware of yourself; everything just flowed. Finding happiness only in the bond of love, without thinking of yourself, without carrying any worry about yourself.

True friendship is not doing to others what you wouldn't want done to you, and seeing your friend's desire as your own and making an effort to fulfill it. That is, building a right bond between you and feeling that friendship. Why does it matter? Because we can reach real happiness and the solution to our problems only this way.

This short film comes from the friendship round of the circle we held by Lake Sapanca. In that circle we also talked about our disconnection from nature and why we make these broadcasts. The whole conversation, with its edited full transcript, is on the Sapanca Special Episode page.