5 Good Reasons for Having Less Friends

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.- Alice Walker

We live in societies that constantly espouse the values of having as many friends as possible. Even our social networks, on such online domains as Facebook or Twitter, measure our worth by the number of people who are willing to call themselves our friends, or to daily follow the gibberish we’re spewing. So why is having less friends better for you? Why shouldn’t having as many friends as possible be the priority of our social lives?

Here’s a few reasons:

1. Love and be loved more:  The more time you spend with people you are not close to, the less time you are spending with the ones that you love and who love you in return.  If feeling loved and appreciated on a daily basis isn’t a good enough aspiration for your social life, I don’t know what is.
2. Waste less time: Not only does spending time with people who aren’t good friends to you, or who are not particularly germane to your life,  get you away from your loved ones, it also means that you are wasting the precious time during which you could be improving your skills at something, experiencing something new, or simply getting better at what you already do (e.g. studying, working, etc). Spend your time wisely. Remember that being popular is not better than being great at everything you do and having the time of your life doing it.
3. Deal with less drama: That everyone brings personal baggage to their relationships is but a given. But having to deal with the baggage of too many people will surely drain you of the energy you could have put towards improving your own life. Furthermore, the more friends you have, the more prone you are to gossip, people’s unfair expectations and other disastrous social situations. Keep only those you trust around you. The others can go elsewhere.
4. Save your job: The more people you have as “friends” is social networking sites, the greater the chances are that you will run into problems if you decide to confess too much on a given day. Furthermore, it isn’t unheard of that coworkers whom we thought we could trust and to whom in a moment of weakness, on a horrible day, we gave a honest confession, have gone and told about it to others, or even worse,- the Boss.  Similar scenarios are multiplied in all spheres of life. Restrict, cut down, and keep only those you trust.
5. Improve your self-esteem: You will feel undoubtedly better about yourself when you do not have to constantly deal with people who bring you down, make you feel bad about the way in which you compare to them, or who demand too much from your friendship. Keep in mind that all relationships demand a lot of work, but some relationships can be so lethal as to make you feel perpetually terrible about yourself. You do not deserve that.  Figure out whether your friend is a constant source of put-downs, and thus a fountain of negativity in your life. Remember that when you let a friend go for this reason, it is not being selfish- it is only protecting oneself. If your friend feels that they are entitled to impinge on your self-esteem and constant step over you, they’re the ones being selfish. What they are really saying is that they do not care enough about you to dread losing you with the stuff they say or do.  And as someone who knows that a good friend would do anything to keep you in their life, and would never on purpose hurt you, you should also know not to feel bad when you have to let someone like this go. Remember, the less time you spend with these people, the more time you can spend on those who are truly worth it.