Friendship Inflation: Why You Should Stop Collecting People

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 the newsroom, we have a limited number of pages. If we give a trivial story too much space, we have to cut the investigative masterpiece. In your life, if you give too much time to “low-stakes” acquaintances—the people you only see out of habit or guilt—you are stealing that time from the people who would actually show up for you at 3:00 AM.

2. The Three-Category Edit
To keep your social life from becoming “cluttered,” you have to categorize your contacts with the ruthlessness of a copy chief:

The Protagonists: These are your core people. They know your “backstory.” With them, you don’t have to perform. You can speak in shorthand.

The Guest Stars: These are the people who bring color and energy to specific chapters—work colleagues, gym buddies, old school mates. They are great, but they don’t need to be in every scene.

The Extras: These are the people you keep around out of “social politeness.” They drain your battery without recharging it. This is where you need to hit “delete.”

3. The Depth Over Breadth Dividend
The most profound conversations I’ve ever had didn’t happen at a loud cocktail party with sixty people. They happened at a small table for two, with a friend I’ve known for a decade, over a bottle of cheap wine.

Depth takes time. It takes shared silence. It takes the ability to go beyond “How’s work?” and get into “What are you afraid of?” You cannot reach that level of intimacy if you are busy maintaining a network of two hundred “friends.”