I had this type of friend in college. He was absolutely desperate for approval. And it’s not like our group was particularly cool people to begin with, nor were we ever really trying to avoid him. He basically already had our approval, but had too little self-esteem/awareness to realize it.

I’m sure tons of people know what “that friend” is like. Constantly lying and exaggerating, constantly doing dangerous and stupid things, etc. This is supposed to be all for your entertainment, even if nobody is playing along with him or wants him to do it. Even if people tell him to stop. He thinks that’s why you keep him around, and he’ll lose you if he stops.

I think about that guy from college a lot. I really tried to push him past that insecurity. Once I resolved to just be insanely, overly nice to him in the hopes that it would break the habit. I stuck it out for 2 months with no noticeable improvement, and it just became exhausting. I didn’t appreciate at the time just how much of a problem it was, I just thought it was a weird personality quirk.

Looking back, it’s pretty obvious that he probably had some kind of disorder (social anxiety, depression? I’m not a psychologist) and would have benefited from therapy or some kind of intervention. The involvement of college alcohol culture obviously didn’t help things, and lots of his stories and antics revolved around it.

Sometimes I wonder if I could have spoken up and helped him. He basically turned into an alcoholic, the 4 year plan became 5, and he never finished college last I heard. I wish that I had better understood at the time why he was like that, and just leveled with him and suggest he talk to somebody. I’m not going to romanticize it and say we were like brothers or he would have taken a bullet for us, but he was a nice guy and the thought of him spending years like that even if he ever got over it is just profoundly sad.

Tl;Dr – when you see someone struggling like this, speak up or you’ll regret it.