‪A True Fiction

Before I became this poor, I didn't overstand that the more your privileged circumstances, the more the shysters, freebooters and hangers-on will come in the name of friendship just to take advantage of you. 

Don’t laugh - I used to be a rich kid. I had almost everything a kid will need to command friendship, and I used to have folks who will do anything just to get close to me.

Some of them will praise everything I do, say or put on, like I am immune to doing a wrong or making a bad decision. They’ll fight among themselves just to be in my good books, blow whistle on each other and sometimes willing to fight for me, but only to grow on me. Eventually shit happened and my circumstances changed. I became ordinary and had nothing much to offer. Today those flatterers I thought were my buddies don’t even recognise my arrival at their hangouts.

This is the sad state of our noble race. We have gotten to the point where the best state of alliance is to act like you don’t have allies, a point where flattery and praise should not be allowed to inflate your sense of self - that way you’ll never feel disappointed. Keep hold of the few that will never hesitate in telling you the truth, even if it hurts, and if you need advice, talk to them, because the rest will only feed you with what you want to hear.

The most dreadful thing about these overly servile phonies is that the more you give them an ear, or give some form of reward for their unsolicited guidance, the more they’ll heighten their lies and gossips, because that's their meal ticket. They’ll play with your sense of loyalty and affection for others, mix you up and make you so erratic and fickle in your dealings with everybody but themselves.

In the end, you may dislike someone this minute only to like the person the next minute, or make a decision this minute only to rescind that decision the next minute, because it is a natural tendency to retract or reverse a misinformed feeling or decision the moment you discover the lies that motivated it.