Get rid of negative friends

 I noticed a lot of significant improvements in my life when I cut out the negative people and surrounded myself only with positive and supportive friends.

Nowadays I have a golden rule where I will study my social circle, and cut out the people I am ‘friends’ with who are negative, selfish, or manipulative. Because I try to be humble and nice (I try, but am not always like this), I sometimes have people take advantage of me for it.

Being humble and nice is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, there will be a lot of people who appreciate it and treat you back with the same positivity. So there is a big benefit to it.

But there will also be people who take advantage of you for it. Often times these are people without many friends, as most normal humans avoid them. I refer to these negative people as -1’s.

When I was younger, I got too deep into spirituality and tried being nice and helpful to everyone. But then there were people who took advantage of me for this. I considered going in the extreme opposite direction of not being nice and helpful, but I realised this wasn’t right either.

Now I believe the ideal situation is somewhere in the middle. It’s being helpful and nice to a few or most people, but definitely not everyone. Surround yourself with people who appreciate you for it and treat you back the same way. Pay attention to who you become friends with, and cut out the -1’s as soon as you notice them.

In my experience it’s better to cut out the -1’s as soon as you become aware of them. Because -1’s tend to not have many friends, the longer you spend time with them, the more they will start to see you as a friend. And when you try to cut them out of your life later, it will be hard.

I’ve had -1’s that I cut out years ago still keep asking me to catch up with them. All because I had a wrong philosophy at the time I met them of trying to be nice to everyone instead of a few people. Instead of getting rid of them straight away, I stayed friends with them for too long because of my wrong belief. (This defective belief was one negative of reading too many spiritual books and blindly following it without thinking logically and comparing my own experiences to it).

There are two things you need to remember from reading this post:

1) Being nice to everyone is a bad idea. There will be those who take advantage of your kindness.

2) Cut out the negative people in your life as soon as you notice them. The earlier you cut them out, the easier things will be. The longer you keep them in your life, the harder it will be to get rid of them later. These negative people are not your ‘friends’, they are heavy weights holding you back from achieving your full potential.