ASSIGNMENT_1

HW_1

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College is a time when you actively seek out new friendships. What kind of relationship do you want to establish with your professors, roommates and classmates?

Indeed, the college offers an unique opportunity for us to establish diverse relationships and emotional bonds with different people.

Engaging with professors, I hope to have a relationship anchored in esteem where I can seek guidance and respect to those guidance, which will help to maintain a healthy relationship with professors.

For peers, like roommates and classmates, my hope is to weave bonds of friendship that are rooted in shared interests and mutual support. Establishing intimate emotional ties where hearts can converse without restraint.

How do social media affect your communication with them?

Social media can exert a significant influence on these relationships. It offers a platform to stay connected.

As an extension of face-to-face communication, it serves a vital means of contact among acquaintances. Needs and being needed can be promptly conveyed through social media, joy and sorrow can be extensively shared among friends. Social media greatly reducing the barriers to communication, making the maintenance of interpersonal relationships much easier.

Even though the role of social media as supplement is immense, it can never replace face-to-face interactions. Gathering to watch a movie, sharing a meal, or even wandering without purpose are all going deeper than the casual chats we have on social media. Rather than saying they are in a relationship of exclusivity, it's more accurate to say they complement and enhance each other.

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I resonate with this particular standpoint.

Yet, what constitutes a friend? Defining this term is pivotal to the discourse.

Why do we seek friends?

According to Maslow's hierarchy of needs: physiological, safety, social (including love and belonging), esteem, and self-actualization. The initial trio represents fundamental needs that must be satisfied, while the latter trio embodies advanced needs that emerge once basic requirements are met, signifying the human yearning for problem-solving and comprehension, as well as the quest to explore various phenomena. It becomes evident that friends serve the apex of basic needs—social interaction. We might posit that friends exist to fulfill our social necessities.

However, those who fulfill this need are not exclusively friends. They could be your partner, your parents, or even a stranger seated beside you during a flight, and in more exceptional cases, an inanimate object might assume the role of a friend.

Hence, in a narrow sense, friends are not an essential component of self-satisfaction, whereas in a broader sense, they are indeed vital.

Your 'friend' need not be a friend."