The Friend I Relied on Too Much

One of my closest friends is a bit of a know-it-all. Sure, incredibly helpful in a pinch, but also highly critical and nearly impossible to measure up to. Early in our friendship, I was eager for connection. I also wasn't great about minding boundaries, or at that stage of my life even aware that I should have them. I'd never had such a close friend before, and it didn't occur to me that it might not be healthy to hang out literally all the time.

At the start, it was all upside. He was a bit of a whiz kid, and seemed to excel at every subject. For me, someone who didn't pay attention in class much, it was nice to have a friend who could sum up a lesson in a few moments to catch me up. Algebra? No problem. Chemistry equations? All day. English? History? Right in his wheelhouse. Dude was scary smart.

Over the years, we became incredibly close. Only with the benefit of hindsight could I see just how much I relied on him, and how unhealthy it was. At the time though, it felt perfectly natural. I didn't notice how dependent I'd become until he moved away.

Almost immediately, my grades started to slip. My folks thought maybe it was me struggling emotionally with losing a close friend, so they cut me a lot of slack. To the point that I found myself believing the story they were telling about me. It wasn't that I wasn't intelligent or capable, it was that I was going through a rough patch.

This story, meant to emotionally insulate me at the time, also obscured my ability to see the truth.

Eventually my "rough patch" turned into a full skid as things went sideways. My grades had all but flatlined, and it was clear more severe intervention was needed if my academic career was going to be resuscitated. My folks began to intervene, and in the evenings as they asked me questions about my homework, I'd often respond authoritatively, even arrogantly “Oh, I know that!” I’d exclaim.

My parents, probably relieved to hear it, would pause and stare, waiting, pensively, for me to reveal the answer I just told them I knew. As one of those pauses stretched, it occurred to me that no, actually, I didn't know the answer. My friend did. I’d become so accustomed to asking him for answers, that I had mistaken my ability to get the information with having it.

I wasn’t super knowledgeable. I hadn't been a good student. I never was. He was, and I’d simply been nearby. Adjacency to information is not the same as acquiring it.

Unfortunately, we all have a friend we rely on too much.

💻 📱 🖥️

Don't believe me?

In a study performed by Matthew Fisher, Mariel Goddu, and Frank Keil at Yale, The Internet Makes You Think You're Smarter Than You Are. They discovered that all of us have fallen into this trap of relying on our "friend" too much.

Having access to information is great. Confusing access to information with actually possessing it is incredibly problematic. It leads to overconfidence in our own knowledge and abilities. It leads us to being less open to actively engaging in learning something because we, mistakenly, believe we already "know" it.

A great eye opener for me was geography. For the most part, when someone mentions a country, I feel pretty confident I know where that is. As it turns out, I don't. (If you think you do, feel free.)

Regardless of your proficiency (or lack of) when it comes to geography, we all have blind spots where we overestimate our knowledge on a topic simply because we have access to information on it. If we're already this overconfident, what's going to happen when we have an omniscient AI friend in our ear, on our wrist, or in our pocket telling us all the answers?

What happens when our friend goes away?