The Give and Take of Relationships
In the past 20 years, social media has exploded onto the scene and has become a part of nearly every teenager’s life. While this has been great for connecting people in ways that would not have otherwise been possible, it has also cost many people their mental health and many friendships. In a 2019 episode of How to Sell Drugs Online Fast, the episode “Score Big or Don’t Score at All” shows how friendships can crash and burn and how social media plays into that. By the end of this episode, the audience learns about the how poorly many teenagers treat their friends and themselves and how that is such a bad thing.
In this episode, we can immediately see the stereotype that men can often be uncaring of others emotions. The main character, Moritz, faced lots of emotional struggles during this episode. He saw his ex-girlfriend, Lisa, going out with another guy, and started stalking her online. He also went to a stressful drug deal with people he met on the internet. At the end of the episode, he went to his good friend, Lenny, for some support. However, Lenny was not happy with Moritz, because Moritz kept Lenny in the dark about everything he was doing. Moritz was becoming easily aggravated and shady about the drug business that he made with Lenny’s help. This lack of transparency lead Lenny to become distrusting of Mortiz. Lenny says, “It’s totally fine that you haven’t exactly been the best friend lately, forget that shit, but that doesn’t give you the right to forget that I actually exist.” This plays into the cliche that men typically are bad at managing their own emotions and the feelings of others. Because Moritz didn’t put in the effort to maintain a good friendship with Lenny, Lenny did not have a good reason to be a friend to Moritz when he needed it.
This episode also showed that young women face issues with friendship and managing their emotions as well. Lisa also experienced a similar situation to Moritz in this episode as well. Lisa was in the back of a party with two of her friends. One of her friends expressed that they would rather choose Lisa and her other friend over anyone else in the world. Shortly after this, Lisa abandoned her friends to go and ask a guy out right in front of Moritz, her aforementioned ex-boyfriend. This displays the conventional image of a selfish, popular girl that doesn’t really care about the people who care about her. Later, when Lisa was feeling guilty about the situation, neither of her friends were there to support her, and nobody was responding to her texts messages either. This is because Lisa was not a good friend to her friends during the good times, so her friends didn’t want to support her in the bad times. This is often a situation many teenagers might be in, so this show sets an example of what not to do in real life.
Throughout this episode, we saw multiple examples of why you need friends. It shows how many teenagers and younger people do not give concern to the people around them as much as they should, which results in people lacking a support system when they really need it. While there were several negative tropes of teenagers, both male and female alike, the episode showed that there is always room for change. The viewer is given the message that even though you might have lots of personal things on your mind, it doesn’t give you a reason to be a bad friend. This is a very positive message for society which has had increasingly bad friendships due to young people obsessing over social media and group status instead of real relationships.
