Friends are really something. If you're like me, then you love to spend time with the people you've met across the years, swapping stories, sharing interests, and just killing time by hanging out. You squander hard-earned money, you crack jokes you otherwise wouldn't utter, you voice an opinion that's often silenced among employers and family. But as your life goes on, eventually, inevitably, you have to leave that particular world behind as business and society draw you in.

The future, near or far, can be frightening, simply because we don't know what it holds. So we, as humans - as friends - have an undeniable desire to remain in the world of our friends.

Normally I'd link this to my Ikusa work, but I'm being serious with this post. I was graced with the chance to spend time with three of my friends yesterday. It made me realize how different I behave with them and how I behave in society. What's more, I'm not the only one who realized this.

One of my friends continued talking about his old life, when he had to disappear, essentially, a few years ago. Back then, he went on and on about how real he felt with himself, about how good his life was going, despite the circumstances taken to reach that life. He told me that yesterday was the best he's felt since that old life. In his words, he "felt like a teenager again."

This sparks an age-old debate, one that I've failed to truly acknowledge until now. Society and personal lives are almost polar opposites - two forces that each house their own troubles and rewards, and each one works in the opposite way of the other. Our personal lives give birth to our dreams and goals. Those dreams and goals direct us to where we want to go in business. That business secures our place among society, and before we realize it, we're too far into the rabbit hole to climb out. Should we try to return to the life we loved, we'd only destroy all that we've worked for. Society would not allow us to simply leave our professional business behind for personal ones.

At the same time, we cannot hope to survive without entering society and establishing ourselves. Should we choose to hide from it, it will be harder to live in general. Respect from your peers will be hard-won, if that. By the time we're fed up with hiding from society, it will have move on without us. We'd have to jump, blindfolded, into the rabbit hole, and hope to God we land softly enough to walk.

Personal and professional. Friends and society. Fire and ice.

In this writer's opinion, society should take a break. Give us a real chance to relax and spend a bit of time in the old, personal worlds of our friends. Give us the opportunity, however fleeting, to practice our old habits and reap the rewards - or consequences. Even if afterward, we're hurting because we've tasted what we missed, I say it's better than forgetting the taste altogether. "Better to have loved and lost..."