I have learned to pay attention.
I have learned that friendship—the kind that lasts, the kind that stretches over decades, the kind that takes root in your bones—does not live in the realm of optimization. It is not something you scale. It does not yield to efficiency. It cannot be plotted on a spreadsheet, measured in gains and losses, tracked like some return on investment. Friendship is what happens in the spaces between.
But I did not always know this.
For years, I watched my own circle shift, not suddenly, but gradually, like the shoreline receding with the tide. Friends who once felt like fixtures faded into the periphery. Some were lost to distance, to time, to circumstance. But others—others were casualties of my own striving, my relentless pursuit of something bigger, something sharper, something better. I began optimizing—my time, my work, my conversations. The slow, meandering joy of being in someone’s company gave way to calculated exchanges, efficiency dictating who stayed and who drifted.
What I found was this: optimization kills organic connections.
It strips friendship of its most sacred quality—its glorious inefficiency. Friendship is built in the waste: in the hours spent talking about nothing, in the long car rides with no destination, in the lingering after the meal is finished, in the laughter that carries no agenda, in the shared silences that stretch into comfort. Friendship is, at its core, a refusal to treat time as a commodity.
The moment I saw certain friends as inputs rather than companions, I had already begun to lose them.
And yet, not all of them fell away. Some remained—not because they were useful, not because they fit neatly into my projects or pursuits, but because our goals, our values, our ways of moving through the world still aligned. They, too, were optimizing—but not at the expense of the relationships that mattered. These were the ones I built with, the ones who knew that self-improvement was not at odds with deep, abiding connection. These were the ones who stayed.
This is not a lament. This is not grief. This is not regret.
This is clarity.
Because the truth is, by now, I have the friends I will carry with me to the grave. I have not had “input” friends in years. The ones left are the ones with whom I share something real—our time, our laughter, our families, our aspirations. They are the ones who are not stagnant, the ones who move and evolve, the ones who seek more without discarding what matters most.
And so, I do not mourn what I have lost. I do not reach for those who faded. Because if friendship is about inefficiency, about time freely given, about presence that does not ask for justification, then what I have now is something solid, something real.
Self-improvement will always be necessary. It will always sharpen and refine. But it is not without its cost. It will cut away what no longer fits, it will strip away the ones who should have been gone long ago. But in the end, what remains is the true measure of the life you’ve built—the ones who stood with you, the ones who wasted time with you, the ones who walked beside you not out of habit, but out of choice.
These are the ones you keep.
