“You will remember the friends you got to do life with on your dying days, not the material junk you collected.” – Kevin Kelly.

Imagine you have achieved a lifelong goal, something you’ve wanted for years. Picture the moment. Really visualise it. Now imagine that none of your friends or loved ones are in your life to celebrate it with you. You don’t need me to spell out how hollow that would be.

The quality of your relationships plays a major role in the quality of your life. In fact, alongside sleep quality, it might be the strongest predictor of wellbeing.

The former director of the world’s longest-running study on mental health (the Harvard Study of Adult Development) went as far as to say “The only thing that really matters in life are your relationships with other people”.

The quality of the people you surround yourself with is not only crucial to your wellbeing and life satisfaction, it’s also good for your health. As the anthropologist Robin Dunbar points out:

“By far the biggest medical surprise of the past decade has been the extraordinary number of studies showing that the single biggest predictor of your psychological and physical health and wellbeing is simply the number and quality of close friendships you have.” [1]

One example Dunbar shares [2]:

This positive effect extends to how we handle stress. Evidence from medical studies shows that people with close friends can endure very high levels of pressure and still cope well. Friendship is a buffer against stress and hardship.

Dr. Robert Waldinger – the current director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development – highlighted a major finding from the Harvard study: “Relationship satisfaction at age 50 was the single greatest predictor of physical health at age 80.”

He wasn’t referring only to romantic partnerships, but to the overall quality of a person’s close relationships:

“It’s not just the number of friends you have, and it’s not whether or not you’re in a committed relationship – it’s the quality of your close relationships that matters.”

Digital friendships don’t offer the same benefits. In her book The Village Effect, the psychologist Susan Pinker reviews the overwhelming evidence that face-to-face contact gives us psychological and health benefits that digital friendships do not.

Evidence is starting to pile up to show that the sharp rise in adolescent anxiety, depression, self-harm, and loneliness since the early 2010s is closely tied to the spread of smartphones and social media. The biggest drivers seem to be platforms like Instagram and TikTok that do a few things in tandem: amplify social comparison, screw up sleep, open the door to cyberbullying, and hook people with addictive design. 

The verdict isn’t in yet – the connection might turn out to be overblown, or the causality could be backwards (maybe young people with mental health issues caused by something else gravitate towards social media). However, it’s a potential link worth taking seriously.

As Waldinger notes, if the internet is used in the right way, “connecting with people online can increase well­being.” For example, reconnecting with old school friends on Facebook and having coffee online.

So, digital friendships can help. They work best alongside, rather than instead of, face-to-face contact. Digital contact helps us stay close to people living far away and offer support when it’s needed, even if it’s through a screen.

The touchstone of friendship

Better a handful of (even one or two) close friends who have your back than hundreds of superficial acquaintances or fair-weather friends.

As we get older, we naturally start to prune our social circle. Some friends come and go. This isn’t a bad thing – it helps us focus on the people and pursuits that matter – as long as it doesn’t go too far.

The Anglo-Irish poet David Whyte put it beautifully:

A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble: of overwork, of too much emphasis on a professional identity, of forgetting who will be there when our armored personalities run into the inevitable natural disasters and vulnerabilities found in even the most average existence.

But no matter the medicinal virtues of being a true friend or sustaining a long close relationship with another, the ultimate touchstone of friendship is not improvement, neither of the other nor of the self; the ultimate touchstone is witness, the privilege of having been seen by someone and the equal privilege of being granted the sight of the essence of another, to have walked with them and to have believed in them, and sometimes just to have accompanied them for however brief a span, on a journey impossible to accomplish alone.

Investing in your friendships

Extroverts and introverts will need different levels of social connection of course, but even introverts underestimate how good they’ll feel from spending time with people they like. In fact, we all seem to systematically underestimate the power of personal relationships.

Friendships need a lot of face-to-face time to flourish. For many adults it’s not easy to find that. One study found that it takes roughly 50 hours of communicating directly with someone to become casual friends, and roughly 100 hours to become solid friends, and 200+ hours to become close friends. Those hours are an investment with enormous mutual benefits. It’s wise (in most cases) to not let close friendships wither through neglect.

From all of this a few good ideas emerge:

• Consider reaching out to an old friend you’ve lost contact with. It doesn’t take much effort, and the upside is potentially huge.
• Set up face-to-face time with friends; don’t always wait for them to do it. Shared meals, casual conversations in a pub, starting a gym routine together, playing poker, playing pool – it can be anything really; the environment is less important than the people you’re with.
• Be a good listener – it matters more than you might think.
• If a friend is going through a hard time, reach out. It will mean a lot to them and they will never forget it.

In the next post in this series, we’ll look at the flipside of this: the people we should avoid or cut out of our lives. It might be the single most important thing you can do for your peace of mind and overall quality of life.

Notes:

[1] Source: The Social Brain, by Tracey Camilleri, Samantha Rockey & Robin Dunbar

[2] “Network” refers to the amount and quality of friendships, and this graph refers to the likelihood of surviving after a year after having a heart attack.