The antidote to loneliness is to have great friends. The recent pandemic has made it harder to maintain that friendship, let alone make new friends. What is the secret of making and maintaining friends?
1. Stay in touch: Friendship is not an arena where you want to play hard to get.
2. Gratitude: If we’re more kind to strangers than to friends, we are doing something wrong.
3. Quality > Quantity: Share emotional experiences. That’s the secret to those friendships where you can just pick up where you left off.
4. Budget your time appropriately: Time is limited. Allocate it wisely. And this is yet another reason to ditch the jerks in your life.
5. How to party: Eat. Laugh. Reminisce. Avoid small talk. The more, the merrier.
6. Make your best friend better: You influence each other more than you know. Make yourself better and help make them better because, in the end, those two are the same thing. (You can read more on life advice from Eric Barker here.