One of the first things we always say in these types of questions is to find new friends who will understand what you're doing in the Dhamma and will not encourage you to do unbeneficial things. Every one of us, when we first started meditation practice, we would have had friends who did unbeneficial things. And for a lot of us still today, we have friends who will do unbeneficial things, but we have to be careful about not joining in with them with their unbeneficial things.
Can we be an example for others to follow? Rather than following others' bad examples? This is an interesting area to look at. Keep in mind that if you go back and you display wonderful qualities, some of those friends are going to be impressed with it. Just like I say every retreat about the meditator going home. If we do things with more compassion and love, some of them are going to get interested, they're going to ask us, "How did it happen?" A lot of people won't, a lot of people will feel afraid of you, they'll feel threatened by you. They won't like you for being a good nice person, because it tells them that what they're doing isn't so nice. But we don't want to get too weighed down by that, because we want to stay being a good nice person. We don't want to lower ourselves to other people's unbeneficial actions and so on, but we want to show them some new ways of living, some beneficial actions. Now it's really hard with family, because for many of us, our family members don't want a single thing to do with this. And yet from time to time we have to meet with them, we have to share with them, family meetings and this and that. It often takes a lot of work to think up alternatives that will please both parties.
For example, for many years I've stopped going to things like baseball games, football games, and all. Spending $20-$30 dollars just for a couple hours or whatever, I've stopped doing that for a long time. And one of my relatives knew I used to love baseball as a kid, so they said, "Hey Steve I've got tickets to a baseball game. Want to go?" when we were visiting them once. And I said, "No thanks." "Oh what's wrong, don't you like baseball?" and all of the sudden there was this obvious confrontation. I'm doing something that's not what the other person wants me to do, because I don't want to waste the money that way. So I thought up an alternative, "Well how about a walk up the mountains?" Seeing as how I knew that person liked to walk up in the mountains. "Oh yeah, that's a good idea!" So we packed a lunch and off we went up the mountains. So sometimes that's how we have to work with our relatives and friends who are doing things we don't really want to join in with. Can we think up an alternative that doesn't make us lower our levels down, and helps them raise up a bit out of their level?