I don't expect anyone to see this since I'm late to the party as usual, but I'd like to show my support for this idea. It's been really true for me in the past, and I'd like to share some of my experiences with this.

My two "best friends" when I was younger, two companions I spent the most time with for many year, both had psychological issues that I feel did me some harm either directly or by association. I don't want to say that these guys were inherently bad people. If they were, I wouldn't have spent so much time with them. They were both funny, charming people, and I had a lot of fun with them, but ultimately I feel that they were doing me harm emotionally, and getting away from them helped me move forward in life. I'm hoping that by describing these characters, maybe some of you reading this will be able to relate and make good judgment calls about people in your life. One thing I will say is that I had many, many friends, and I wish I might have spent more time with some of the other ones who were more productive, functional people because it might have rubbed off on me.

"The Predator" was a friend I knew throughout junior high and high school, and afterwards. Initially we became friends because honestly no one else in my school shared my interests. We were both comic book fans, and both loved drawing, and later on we both went goth, so we like the same music to a large extent.

The Predator decided he was going to try to live the lifestyle of a rock star. He spent a lot of time playing guitar, meeting other musicians, and trying to have a successful band. He also became the kind of person who would stab any friend in the back to get laid. If he had a friend whose relationship was weak, he would bide his time until the moment was right, and then fuck the guy's girlfriend behind his back. He did this once to me in high school, then came crawling back to be my "buddy" and later in life I had thought he would outgrow this kind of behavior, but I saw him do this to one new "friend" after another, and I was expected to just keep my mouth shut and stay out of the way while nice guys he met were used as avenues to steal girlfriends, or at least to screw them. It was gross. It was also a situation where, for example, if you were out at a bar or club with friends and met a woman who was at all attractive, he would sabotage all his friends efforts, try to make them look stupid or at least try to out-peacock them with his rockstar bullshit. Some might say that if a woman would fall for that crap she wasn't worth your time anyway, but this became a pervasive pattern of backstabbing, and he lost a lot of friends this way. I felt close to this guy, and I valued his friendship, or so I thought, but he could also be very domineering. He had his own little weird perspective on the world, and could be very pushy about his views. Being close to him could make even the strongest personalities feel small. You don't want to be around anyone who makes you feel this way, whether you believe it's intentional or just a consequence of his personality. He also didn't really have a real plan for life, or know how to support himself. He depended on family money, and didn't really ever truly get his shit together as far as I know. I was trying to make it in computer game development for much of the time I was friends with him, and his kind of lifestyle could be infectious and counterproductive when you're trying to focus on real life goals. You can't stay out all night partying when you're trying to get ahead in gamedev. There's a lot of work to do, and a lot of "homework" to do. People who live life as a party have every right to do so if they're wealthy enough to survive that way, but if you have any actual goals in life you can't let party animal types into your life. Instead, spend your time as much as possible with people who share the same kinds of goals you have. If you want to be a cartoonist, hang out with other cartoonists or aspiring cartoonists. If you want to be a musician, spend your time with productive musicians, not the party animal rockstar types who only play music to get laid. If you want to be a writer, spend your time writing and with other writers. Join writing oriented groups or go to events related to writing. Either be coproductive, or competitive, but stay on target.

The second friend type I call The Leech. I don't want to suggest that this person is always a mooch. In fact, sometimes these kind of people can be very helpful, but there's an emotional effect they have. Leeches are emotional vampires. They drain your emotional energy. They probably don't mean to do any harm, but they don't understand how emotions work, and they will drag you down by association. Like the Chernobyl reactor core, you don't want to get too close to this kind of person. If I had to identify this type, I'd say look up negativistic personality disorder (AKA passive-aggressive disorder) in the DSM addendum. It's not an officially accepted designation, but the description is pretty good. Essentially these are depressed people who have a negative effect on those around them. Instead of spending your time being happy an focusing on your life goals, you end up listening to a lot of self-hate and depressing talk that drags you down. If they're bipolar, you will also be subjected to their manic phases, which consist of boasting or grandstanding or unrealistic optimism that is equally useless. The guy in particular that I'm talking about had a tendency in his manic phase to misrepresent himself to people he would meet, pretending to have some big plan or some big project, or even to be something he clearly was not. He would pretend to be a film director when he had never picked up a camcorder or film camera in his life, or he would pretend to be a screenwriter and go around describing "his big film project" which was actually an idea I had and told him about. He would do all this weird stuff in the hopes that people would believe it and buy into it and like him. Afterward he wouldn't be the only one dealing with the embarrassment of his ridiculous lies. His friends would be left to cover for him as well, and that just sucked. When the manic phase would pass, he would be left with the inevitable depression and realizations that he's a nothing, and he made all those claims because he wishes he was something, but he's too fucking lazy to do anything about it. While I spent a lot of time doing tutorials and training with countless professional software applications to move toward my goals, he would just daily offer new "get rich quick" schemes, an ever-changing series of disconnected, fuzzy ideas and impossible goals. This kind of pseudo-brainstorming is a huge waste of time and effort, and it was a product of his lack of focus in life. Every time I would suggest he learn some specific skill, whether software or just a general skill, he would make some lame excuse, then go back to laying around like a walrus, eating take-out and watching bullshit pseudo-documentaries on television instead of getting a real education.

Lazy, self-indulgent people will only waste your time, fuck up your focus, and drag you down. Depressed people will only waste your time listening to crying. Send them to a fucking therapist. Don't try to save anyone. That's not your job. Focus on yourself and your goals. Lose the losers. Birds of a feather flock together, and if you lie down with dogs, you get fleas.