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Instead of Trimming Your Social Circle, Bolster It
Now is the time for making friends, not ditching them
Time for an obvious truth: The pandemic put friendships through the wringer. We were physically separated, forced to make the hard choices of who to include in our quarantine pods, and sometimes too exhausted to keep up the Zoom happy hours — leading some people (myself included) to wonder if they had any friends left at all.
Now that the worst of the crisis is hopefully behind us, many are reevaluating who they want to be, and who they want to surround themselves with, on the other side. We’ve been given an opportunity to reset, a blank slate for a post-pandemic life, and some people are taking advantage with drastic haircuts, workout regimens, and even trimming their friend circles.
A recent New York Times article suggests pruning friends from your social network as a post-pandemic life hack. While there is nothing wrong with leaving friendships to wither on the vine that no longer serve us or, worse, were detrimental to our mental health, one of the piece's arguments hinges on how friends with supposedly “unhealthy” attributes, like depression, obesity and who frequently smoke and drink, make it more likely we will share those same traits.
