Here's a question that sounds abstract but isn't: can someone who has genuinely made progress help someone else who has also genuinely made progress? Or does real development make you self-sufficient — needing nothing from outside, needing no one?
I've thought about this, and my answer is no. Development doesn't make you self-sufficient in that way. It makes you better at using what other people offer.
Think of two skilled wrestlers. They don't practice alone if they can avoid it; they sharpen each other. A musician of real ability is stirred differently by playing alongside someone of equal skill than by practicing in a room by themselves. The standard doesn't just hold — it rises. This is not because either person is deficient. It's because excellence maintained in isolation slowly loses its edge. Virtue, like a muscle, needs something to push against.
What good people give each other is harder to name than what they take from bad company, but it's real. They quicken each other's impulses. They point toward opportunities for action that one person alone might not have seen. They confirm, by their example, that the direction is right. And there's something else — something I find difficult to articulate but have experienced: the particular pleasure of being in the company of someone who is genuinely trying, who shares your values not as a performance but as a fact of their character. You feel recognized in a way that nothing else quite provides.
Bad people harm each other reliably — each one approving the other's worst impulses, pooling their failures into a common mess that's harder to climb out of than any individual failure would be. The mirror works the same way in both directions. Which is why the people you keep close are not a minor matter.
Good men are mutually helpful; each gives practice to the other's virtues and thus maintains wisdom at its proper level.
There's a practical dimension too, which I think gets undervalued: even someone who has thought carefully and long about how to live still benefits from counsel on the specific cases. The physician knows medicine and still consults colleagues. The pilot knows navigation and still reads conditions with others. Wisdom about the general doesn't automatically resolve every particular, and a second mind — especially one that's been working on similar problems — sees things differently than you do, sometimes more clearly precisely because it's not your situation.
I've noticed this in myself: I give better advice about other people's problems than my own. Some of this is the natural distance, but some of it is that another person's predicament doesn't carry the emotional weight that clouds the view. A friend who can think clearly about your situation, and who knows you well enough to tell you the truth, is one of the most valuable things in the world.
But here's what I want to end with, because I think it's the heart of it: the best reason to seek out good people is not instrumental. It's not that they'll help you solve problems or maintain your virtue or keep your standards from slipping. It's that genuine goodness is naturally dear to itself, that recognizing it in another person feels like recognizing something you'd almost forgotten about yourself.
This is a great teaching. Don't isolate your best qualities from the people who might answer them. Find those who are pulling in the same direction, and pull together. The yoke is lighter that way — and the road, somehow, longer.
Always desiring and always refusing the same things — that's what it looks like when two people have genuinely found each other. I want that for you.
Yours, and grateful for it,