We all know this person. The one we might call a friend. We call everyone friends. We can’t help it. We just do. But we probably don’t really treat this person like we do people we really count as our friends.

That person is the one you call upon when you have no one else to talk to or hang out with. This happens when our plans with everyone else we regularly socialize with fall through, or maybe they are busy, but we want to do something. We never want to talk to this person otherwise.

That person is undeniably reliable. When we have problems, we can call upon that person and tell them what we need to get off our chests. To be polite, we might ask how that person is doing, but in all honestly, we probably don’t really care. That person is good to us. They never forget events that are important to us. That person happily shares in our celebrations without a complaint ever. Whether it be a wedding, birthday, children, fights with significant others, we can always count on that person to be happy for us and celebrating or picking up pieces for us.

We may not mean to, but we always take that person for granted. We might try to do things to show appreciation for that person. But we still manage to make it about ourselves and what we’d prefer to do and not what that person might actually want. After all, when we suggest things, it is stuff we usually do so how could that person possibly not want to do it? They’ve done those things before with us.

But maybe, just maybe we are that person. Maybe we happily are there for people we genuinely consider as friends who might not think of us that way. It’s just in our nature to be there others. Knowing that others haven’t or won’t be there is a depressing thought, so we try to do that for others so they never have to face that thought of “what if no one is here for me”? Seeing someone else suffer like that would just be cruel.

If we are that person, we know we fill a role for society when we are that person. Society and life in general would be awful if it weren’t for people like us. The ones who always there for others. Of course, the ideal would be to have a balance of being that person and being the people who use that person. Maybe one day we can achieve it.

Perhaps being aware how we treat that person we all know will make us aware of how we interact in society in general. Sometimes, if we look around, we might find that with all the things we use for convenience in our lives such as smart phones, computers, etc., we have forgotten how to be decent to each other. Hopefully one day our collective failures to treat each other well no matter who we are dealing with won’t come back to bite us in the ass.