People dramatically underestimate the opportunity cost of…
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People dramatically underestimate the opportunity cost of maintaining friendships.
Most people never question how much time they invest into maintaining friendships. It's treated as something that is automatically worth doing, but I think the opportunity cost is almost never discussed.
The average friendship requires a huge amount of time. Going out, messaging, making plans, catching up, birthdays, holidays, random conversations—it all adds up over years. Imagine putting those same thousands of hours into learning a skill, building a business, improving your health, or advancing your career. The difference after ten years would probably be enormous.
People often defend this by saying "humans are social creatures." I think that phrase gets thrown around far too casually. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's the best use of everyone's time. Society has almost turned socialising into a default expectation, when sometimes it's nothing more than a glorified waste of time that people never stop to question.
I also find it strange how someone can complain about being broke, unemployed, or stuck in life while spending most evenings and weekends socialising. If you're struggling financially or professionally, shouldn't your priorities reflect that? It seems backwards to spend countless hours maintaining a social life before fixing the fundamentals of your own life.
Modern society also treats having friends as if it's a measure of success. If someone says they don't have friends, people immediately assume something is wrong with them. Yet the number of friends someone has tells you almost nothing about their discipline, ambition, intelligence, or future. Somehow we've confused popularity with personal success.
I'm not arguing that friendships have zero value. I'm arguing that, for most people, the amount of time invested in them far outweighs what they actually get back. If more people invested even half of that time into themselves instead, I think they'd end up with better lives.
#conversation
Most people never question how much time they invest into maintaining friendships. It's treated as something that is automatically worth doing, but I think the opportunity cost is almost never discussed.
The average friendship requires a huge amount of time. Going out, messaging, making plans, catching up, birthdays, holidays, random conversations—it all adds up over years. Imagine putting those same thousands of hours into learning a skill, building a business, improving your health, or advancing your career. The difference after ten years would probably be enormous.
People often defend this by saying "humans are social creatures." I think that phrase gets thrown around far too casually. Just because something is common doesn't mean it's the best use of everyone's time. Society has almost turned socialising into a default expectation, when sometimes it's nothing more than a glorified waste of time that people never stop to question.
I also find it strange how someone can complain about being broke, unemployed, or stuck in life while spending most evenings and weekends socialising. If you're struggling financially or professionally, shouldn't your priorities reflect that? It seems backwards to spend countless hours maintaining a social life before fixing the fundamentals of your own life.
Modern society also treats having friends as if it's a measure of success. If someone says they don't have friends, people immediately assume something is wrong with them. Yet the number of friends someone has tells you almost nothing about their discipline, ambition, intelligence, or future. Somehow we've confused popularity with personal success.
I'm not arguing that friendships have zero value. I'm arguing that, for most people, the amount of time invested in them far outweighs what they actually get back. If more people invested even half of that time into themselves instead, I think they'd end up with better lives.
#conversation
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