In the age of social media, we’ve been conditioned to think of friendship as a volume game. We “follow,” we “connect,” and we “add.” We treat our social lives like a sprawling Sunday newspaper—filled with endless supplements, lifestyle sections, and classified ads that we never actually read. But the older I get, the more I realize that a high-quality life is not a broadsheet; it’s a tightly edited, high-gloss magazine. 1. The “Maintenance” Tax Every person in your life requires a certain amount of emotional “bandwidth.” When you have 50 “close” friends, you aren’t actually close to anyone; you’re just spread thin, like butter scraped over too much bread. In…