What do you most value in your friends? Their continued existence.

The line is a characteristically dry, Hitchens-style inversion of the usual sentimental answers to a question about friendship. Instead of praising loyalty, wit, or kindness, it reduces the “most valued” quality to the bare precondition for any friendship at all: that the friend remains alive. The humor carries a darker undertone—friendship is shadowed by time, illness, accident, and mortality, and the loss of friends can make all other virtues feel secondary. Read this way, the quip becomes both a joke and a compact expression of grief-avoidance: what one most wants from friends is simply not to have to mourn them yet.