At some point in my twenties i had a lot of people around. Big group chats, regular gatherings, the kind of social life that looked full from every angle. I measured friendship partly by quantity back then without fully realising i was doing it. More people meant more belonging, or at least that was the feeling underneath it.
Then things started to thin naturally. People moved, got busy with their own families and careers, drifted toward their own smaller worlds. And i noticed something i had not expected. The thinning did not feel like loss. It felt like clarity.
What remained after the natural sorting was something different in quality from what i had before. Fewer people but people who actually knew me. Conversations that went somewhere real instead of staying permanently on the surface. Relationships where i did not have to perform or manage or maintain an image, just show up as i actually was and have that be enough.
I think there is a version of a large social circle that is more about managing loneliness than about genuine connection. When you have enough people around all the time, you can go a very long time without actually being known by any of them. The noise fills the space where the emptiness would otherwise be obvious.
A smaller circle makes that impossible to hide from. You are either actually known by the people in it or you are not, and there is no crowd to dissolve into when the answer is not.
I have four or five people i would call without thinking if something went seriously wrong. Who know the real context of my life without needing the background explained. Who have seen versions of me i would not want on display publicly and chose to stay anyway.
That is a smaller number than my twenties would have considered enough. But it is the most genuinely wealthy i have ever felt in terms of actual human connection.
Quality did not come with quantity. It came after i stopped mistaking one for the other.
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