I think it starts slowly, I think this is a truth universal. Text messages take longer to be responded to, if they don’t go completely unanswered. Plans fall through, dinners get skipped, group chats once vibrant start to find themselves being muted, then opted out of, then empty and silent as some abandoned building you once called familiar.
Parties get smaller. Calendars get emptier. The circle, it seems, shrinking all this while, has finally started looking more like a period than a circle at all. Small to the point of filled in with what you’ve got, no room for the something you used to leave space for.
We’re told we should be collectors, hoarders by nature, by the media we consume and the society that sells it. We’re told we should do everything, say yes always, that we should rebel against the Spring cleaning that seems to occur naturally as we grow. But what if growing up, growing older, just means we’re learning, and re-learning, our own limits? What if our circles were always meant to shrink?
Since the invention of that two-faced beast that is Social Media, we’ve been conditioned to aim our collective social sights on one thing: Expansion. We are told to network, to branch out, to connect, to find friends of friends to become new friends themselves. We’re given LinkedIn accounts to make friends of colleagues, to find valuable connections hiding even in our workplaces, we measure our worth in the number of followers we amass on Instagram or TikTok. We judge ourselves on our virality, and hope that one day the fickle light of the algorithm will shine upon us.
In our real lives (IRL in kidspeak, duh) we feel this pressure, acutely, and we compare ourselves to every other person we know. “They seem to always be out with their friends,” we think, “everyone else is so social!” we lament as we hold a giant bowl of popcorn on our couch at 8:30pm on a Friday night. We must be doing something wrong, our social networks are broken, we assert, it’s our fault.
Only maybe it isn’t. Only maybe our social networks are supposed to change as we get older, and in their transformation, supposed to tighten up, to shrink down. Maybe this is a natural thing, a consequence of finding your actual people, those that compliment (and complement) your soul instead of forcing you to adapt it to acquiesce to the climate they create.
I’ve sermonized here quite often about my views on life, on the way a life is lived and the simple reduction of the components that get us through a day. I’ve said, more times than I can count at this point, that I believe life to be about energy, that’s it. We wake each day with a certain number of “energy dollars” that we’re allotted to spend, and each choice we make, each activity we participate in, each conversation we have, use some of that energy money. Maybe aging is just about the internal mental math that takes place instantly and effortlessly when something arises that will cost some of our energy bucks, the math that determines the cost to benefit ratio.
Maybe, sometimes, the math just doesn’t add up and we decide, without really deciding at all, to keep those dollars safe, to spend them elsewhere.
Never does this mean we love our friends less, never does it mean we do not value social connection or the friendships we’ve made along the way. Life asks more and more of us the further into it we delve, the inflation rate higher than we’re told when young. Those cherished energy dollars just don’t go as far as they once did. If we want to make it to retirement, the little hidden accountant in the deep folds of our brain screams out, we’ve gotta save some.
There exist a million reasons this little CPA within our psyches feels the need to raise their voice louder and louder the older and older we get, and these reasons are as personalized as the people we are. Some fall in love, get married, and start a family. Some take on jobs or roles in their lives they never expected to, from full-time professionals to caretakers to those they live with. Some find solace in introversion, in the lack of impetus to be something they’ve never been, to wear the masks they’ve been wearing all that time. Some are diagnosed late as neurodivergent (*ahem*) and find some sweet and powerful understanding as to the true needs that sustain them.
Some, find that depth replaces breadth, and find that this is more than ok, it’s wonderful.
For awhile, Sarah and I thought we were doing something wrong, we thought there was a problem we had to fix. Invitations slowed down, it got more and more challenging to even have friends over for a simple dinner. We’d always been two that were perfectly content with one another’s company (probably me more than she) but it just seemed like everywhere we turned we were faced with reminders that other people are just doing it better. Every show we watched, every movie that we tried out on a Saturday night, it all seemed to be groups of adult friends going through their lives together not apart. Why not us?
Then we realized, we stepped back and admitted the truth: Hollywood ain’t real. Sure it seems idyllic and wonderful that Monica, Chandler, and the rest of the gang did literally everything together, but it also seemed plausible they could afford to live in these massive sprawling apartments in NYC. It also gets overshadowed that eventually, they too moved on, some to the suburbs, some to different states, some to their own lives. Sure they still love each other, but it just wasn’t the same, not anymore. This is ok.
The shape of life changes, this is what growth looks like. This is ok.
I believe now, with a strange certainty and comfort, that not everyone is meant to stay in every chapter of our lives. We’re novels being written, the lot of us, and new pages are inked each day we are lucky enough to wake, to wander through the story being told. The shrinking of our circles never means the shrinking of our hearts, just the reallocation of the funds we once spent there, somewhere else, somewhere new.
I spend my energy dollars (I need a symbol for this, something like the $ but with an E, but not the €) on Sarah now, on Henry and Addie, on Gilly. I spend them on my parents each evening as we take our dogs on walks together, I spend them on people that have stayed close, have huddled inside that little circle and never wandered outside it. It’s a smaller diameter, sure, but dammit if it’s not more special than it’s ever been. I see now, I’m not losing people, I’m just making more room for the ones that stuck.
I wonder sometimes, if we’re unique in this, or if others feel this drift too. I wonder if the circles of you who read this have been cinching in as ours are, if your friendships have shifted as you’ve grown older. Perhaps you’ll tell me, perhaps you’ll share.
Maybe there’s a new question we should ask those we meet, something deeper than “how’s it going” or “what do you do for a living,” and maybe I know what it is. Maybe it’s this:
Who is still with you from your old life, and who have you gently let go of?
Maybe then we’ll know, maybe then we’ll see. It’s all circles in the end, sometimes we just have to wait and see where they overlap, and love the way we grow.
Our circles will shrink,
and our networks will dwindle.
In less there is more.
