Performance and Development Review of Life

At work we are about to have Performance and Development Reviews (PDR) to assess how well we are doing at work, what skills we lack and how we can improve our performance at work. Our salaries and bonuses also rely on these PDRs so you have to take it quite seriously.

What I want to know is, why isn't there a PDR for life. Wouldn't it be so easy if you and your friends could fill out a form about how you are going in life. Thanh, you got a 9 in being a helpful friend, but only a 4 in being more aggressive and striving for what you want. This would help to give you a much clearer direction in life, but instead most of us have to go through and make mistakes (some more costly than others) to learn more about ourselves.

Lately, I've been comptemplating about many more issues in my life, one of which is friendship again. I wonder if it's writing this blog that really makes you stop and reassess your life, growing older and learning more about life, or the increasing influence of my friend John who keeps saying that his philosophical outlook on life is rubbing off on me. I think it's probably a combination of the three, but I'll discuss that in another blog post should the need arise.

I had recently written a post called Recipe for Good Friendship where friendship was analogous to food. As I had written, we choose certain friends for qualities they possess that we enjoy, want to achieve or have common interests. But what if you have outgrown a friend and to use the food analogy, no longer like eating apple pie.

Recently I had an argument of sorts with a friend. I had been saying for a couple of months that I was getting sick of his sarcastic unserious (not sure if that's a proper word) attitude to life. I said that I didn't know when to take him seriously or if he was "just joking". This came to a few arguments (which I thought were serious) because he said things about me that I didn't agree about, so I then went and argued against. In turn, his response was to start the argument but not continue it and instead take the easy way out by saying it was all "a big joke" and I was taking it all too seriously. Well this made me even madder and made it look like I couldn't take criticism.

So recently we had another disagreement which once again revolved around our opinion of what type of person each other was. I said that I was sick of his constant non-serious attitude and turning everything I say against me. Either I fell for "another joke" or it was serious argument, I went into defensive mode again. This prompted him to say that in the past couple of months I had turned from a fun loving person to a bitter negative person. I thought about this a little bit when I went home and realised that maybe it was true. I wasn't bitter or negative to anyone else except him. But why was this? My conclusion was that it's a self defence mechanism. Since I never knew when he was serious or not, I too had become one of those non-serious sarcastic person around him because I didn't want to get upset again over comments that I may take seriously but he would claim are jokes.

So what has happened to this friendship. We used to get along very well but nowadays I just find it so boring with all this stupid chat and nit picking of every word or action I do. So have we just learnt more about each other and not liked it. Have I outgrown this friend or realised that maybe we never were truly good friends. When do you know that your friend no longer provides anything you need or want. What's the official clue that you should no longer be friends. And what happens then, you can't exactly "dump" your friend, so do you just talk and see them less and slowly drift apart or put it out in the open and discuss it? I will try again to talk seriously to this friend about what I feel are the problems. He may agree or disagree but hopefully we can work out a solution. Otherwise maybe we just aren't suppose to be good friends after all and should just be aquaintances.