The proper way to create friends is to have a warm heart, not simply money or power. The friend of power and the friend of money are something different.
Trouble has no necessary connection with discouragement. Discouragement has a germ of its own, as different from trouble as arthritis is different from a stiff joint.
Samsara - our conditioned existence in the perpetual cycle of habitual tendencies and nirvana - genuine freedom from such an existence- are nothing but different manifestations of a basic continuum. So this continuity of consciousness us always present. This is the meaning of tantra.
The amount of information, the amount of incoming that any administration has to deal with today and respond to much more rapidly than ever before, that makes it different.