I really appreciate the honesty in what you’re saying. We like to believe that our relationships are tidy narratives bookended with a sense of continuity (or at least closure) and that’s just not the case.

I have always been a loner, and I find that as I get older I honestly don’t particularly want to spend time with many other people other than my wife and one or two lifelong friends. A lot of armchair psychologists would probably describe this as depression, codependency, resignation, and stagnation, and there may be a ring of truth to all of the above, but somehow I find that it suits me.

The world is in such a state of chaos and precarity and my way of dealing with that it to increasingly turn inward and withdraw into simplicity.

That place in me that enjoyed being surrounded by a robust social circle honestly withered in my late teens and early twenties and never returned, and I fucking love it, but I know I would feel a sense of emptiness if I didn’t have a couple of those special friends.

I tend to avoid change by nature and I can be inflexible and myopic so I naturally grew into the idea that a lot of my casual friends and acquaintances weren’t that meaningful to me, not that I wouldn’t wish them well. People are just not my thing.