On Friendship Beyond Materialism

I was lucky enough to spend my school years through a shift of paradigms — from the USSR to the first sprouts of something that looked like capitalism.

Even though I studied at a gymnasium with intensive English, in the early grades we all lived more or less the same way. The friendships taking shape between us back then had nothing to do with how much money there was at home (or how little). We were friends unconditionally, just as we were, bound only by our values and our human qualities.

I remember stories of looking out for each other with real warmth — how we’d chip in and, down to our last kopecks, buy lunch from the “extended” menu in the cafeteria. That counted as a small badge of prestige.

By the year 2000, when we finished school, the picture had changed a great deal: families had begun to live very differently — from modest to the screaming luxury of the 90s. For some of the kids the shift in family fortunes meant nothing; for others, a great deal. A few years on, coming to the reunions, we’d see personal bodyguards waiting in the lobby and ever more lavish cars with drivers. Some started “measuring up” — whose dad earned more, what title he held, whose bodyguards were tougher. They began to sort themselves into groups by their idea of social status.

That stretch wasn’t without its valuable lessons for me either. I remember how one “buddy” was supposedly my best friend whenever I had a computer that could run the new games — and how he’d vanish without a trace the moment a newer model showed up at his place. Another “buddy” announced openly in the courtyard that he intended to hang out only with people “who had cash.” A pretty radical stance for a thirteen-year-old!

Even so, I’m grateful — to that time, to my parents, to my friends and teachers — that my values around friendship were put to the test by the distortions of materialism and held.

Research shows that children rarely form their values in a vacuum; most of them are passed down from the parents. And so, years later, children started arriving for my peers. And now it’s the parents who’ve begun “measuring up” against one another, boasting, for instance, that their kid hangs out with children from “star” families!

It’s a wonderful thing to want to give your children the chance to study at the best schools, with good social connections. But is it worth using children to indulge your own pride?

An obsession with social status can impose criteria based not on personal merit but on factors the child has no say over (the family’s standing, for one). Children begin to value wealth achieved at any cost above human qualities. It gets worse when parents pull their children into their own private contest, making them see themselves not as independent people but as one element of the family “project.” Maybe some of these parents once suffered from being undervalued as kids, and now they want to “let loose”?

For a harsher example — I once overheard a mother scolding her daughter: “You got a four, and Masha, from an ordinary family, got a five! You’ve disgraced the family!”

Children raised under pressure to choose often lose the ability to trust their intuition, to learn to “read” people, to make a conscious choice and carry the responsibility for it. Their sense of happiness and success becomes tied directly to material wealth. As they grow up, they may struggle with fitting in socially and building healthy relationships.

In my view, real friendship is when people are bound by shared values and goals, whatever the outer context. With friends like that, nothing is out of reach, no matter where you start!

Here’s to being friends who value each other for the likeness of our ideals! 😎

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P.S. Twenty-four years after graduation, I have no evidence that the kids from wealthier families in our class went on to greater success. Many of the families that “shone” back then now live modestly. Money comes and goes. Life is a marathon, not a sprint, and in the end it was values and personal qualities that proved decisive.