People, not things, make your enjoyment of life. It’s the message of the Little Prince, the Ode to Joy, everybody has heard it. But I actually think people at large do not prioritise friendship. Not even friendship but all relationships. There is a poem by Voltaire saying that in order to be happy you need a wife, friends, family and enemies. I get that. You need people who will react to what you do. In this respect a strong enemy is equivalent to a dear friend. You need this because ideas are not real. They are some kind of mapping onto the world of real things, a trained mind can climb up and perceive the abstract beauty of idea space for quite some time, but like whales need to get out of the water every now and then, humans need to visit home, reality regularly to keep themselves happy. The thing is an isolated mind does not really distinguish between the real and the ideal, all of your thoughts are imagined and they turn against you pretty quickly. People who interact with you show you different perspectives of yourself. All imagined too, of course, but like triangulation is necessary to measure distance despite the foreshortening of perspective, different views of yourself give you an inkling of who you are, reducing the importance of each individual viewpoint, including your own. Provided you have constant behaviour, people will pick up on the patterns and show you what they mean to them. Only then can you even make informed choices about who you want to become. It’s difficult to be a friend because you have to make yourself vulnerable. But I wager all social fears come from this fact. I used to be shy because I didn’t know what to say, how to speak pleasantly, how to turn conversations to things that interest me, because I felt lie an outsider, like an easy victim etc. None of this is true anymore. Sometimes I reacted directly to one of those fears by some kind of training. For the majority however, I don’t think they were a motivation. But I am very critical of myself and it really took me 15 years or so, from the day where I identified how I wanted to be in some of my family members to the point where I was finally satisfied with how I became. And I learned it from friends in a time where I had been particularly disappointed in myself.