Do you have any worthless friends that need to be removed from your life? Can you easily identify and confirm which friends are without value and detrimental to your happiness and goal attainment? If you’re not sure, this article may help.
It does not matter if the worthless person is a friend or a relative. Spending time with them or keeping them around is pointless and does not serve you positively.
Everyone has good and bad sides, as is sometimes said. Some people, however, allow their bad tendencies to manifest, grow, and establish. It becomes so ingrained in them that it is sometimes hard for others to easily detect these undesirable and damaging attributes. In other cases, an extreme event either bad (betrayal, abuse) or good (inheritance, promotion) propels a person toward a positive, negative, or neutral change.
Here are some examples of the behavior of worthless friends.
- Liar – A worthless friend. Not always so apparent. It can be hard to see or confirm that a friend is a liar. You may have wondered if their fantastic tales were true. But people who lie constantly get very good at it.
- Liars lie to show accomplishments and character that they do not have. They do it to manipulate.
- Reconciliating a relationship with a liar is impossible since your entire history is probably saturated with falsehoods.
- Manipulator – Rather than being straightforward and honest, manipulators use emotionally charged words and exaggeration to get you to do things that serve them. It may be manipulation if you feel you’re being “sold” to do something.
- The solution is to stop allowing yourself to be manipulated by just saying, “No!”
- If the amount and severity of the manipulation are low, the relationship may be salvageable. If both are high, why bother?
- Self-Server – Everything must serve them in some way or they are uninterested. They are selfish and egotistical.
- Controller – They create conditions where the people around them feel obligated, frightened, or guilted into serving them.
- Demander – This type of person demands that you meet their
unreasonable standards for friendship. End the friendship if they expect you to do things that go against your principles or jeopardize your physical, emotional, or financial health. - A demander might ask to use your good credit to repair their bad credit. (Personal example below.)
- Criticizer – Looks for faults in people and things and communicates them to prop up their poor self-esteem or to feel superior. They may criticize directly, jokingly, cleverly, or strategically. Regardless of the tactic used to criticize, the purpose and outcome are always negative.
- Ignorer – They refuse to pay attention and learn. They are closed to new information and self-improvement.
Although I’ve encountered all these attributes in people, I’ll share this particularly troublesome one. I had a “friend” who stopped communicating with me because I refused to allow him to use my perfect credit to rebuild his obliterated credit through some (crooked) lawyer’s scheme. I initiated a reconnection a few years later, but it proved a huge mistake.
Shortly after we reconnected, my “friend” got a multimillion-dollar inheritance that included several huge apartment buildings. When I was in a transition that involved a move, he offered me a free apartment in exchange for handling a few “things” for him. His new unearned wealth had transformed my “friend” into an egotistical, know-it-all tyrant. Needless to say, I soon moved out. Many months later, I emailed him to set the record straight without real interest in resuming the friendship. It came as no surprise that his terse reply ended our friendship… again! This behavior never upset me since I was one of many people he had ended long-term friendships with. My conclusion: Good riddance!
Pick your friends carefully. Drop friends who are incompatible with your principles or treat you inappropriately. A few great friends are infinitely better than a horde of mediocre friends.