Life & Wisdom Quote by Arthur Bloch

In one line, Bloch flips the sentimental idea of social life into a kind of emotional accounting ledger. “Friends come and go” sounds like a shrug at the normal churn of adulthood: people move, priorities change, intimacy has seasons. Then he hits the turn: “but enemies accumulate.” The joke is that enmity behaves like debt, not weather. It doesn’t drift off; it compounds.

Bloch, best known for Murphy’s Law and related riffs on human systems failing in predictable ways, writes like a satirist of bureaucracy and behavior. The intent here isn’t to advise you to stockpile grudges; it’s to expose how conflict sticks because it has narrative. An enemy gives you a story you can replay, a villain you can cast, a grievance you can curate. Friendship requires maintenance and mutual effort; hostility can survive on inertia, sustained by pride and the low-grade dopamine of being “right.”

The subtext is uncomfortably modern: our culture rewards friction. Social platforms turn disagreement into identity, and identity into a permanent record. When friendships fade, they often do so quietly; when relationships sour, they leave artifacts - screenshots, subtweets, reputations - that keep animus on life support. “Accumulate” also hints at the self-fulfilling trap: the more enemies you collect, the more defensive you become, and the more likely you are to interpret neutral interactions as threats.

Bloch’s cynicism works because it lands as a laugh, then lingers as a warning: if you don’t actively prune resentment, you’ll end up richer in the one currency you can’t spend.