As you get older you slough off friends. You keep the good ones, or at least the ones you are compatible with. My wife and I need almost no friends. We have family.
The younger you are, the more friends you usually need. And double or triple it if you’re single.
Men don’t have friends. Just drinking buddies.
It is not merely a matter of “sloughing off” friends as you get older. They keep dying on you....
Guess I have to start finding younger friends.
I've never really felt the need to have many friends, or been a big socializer. I can count the number of long-time close friends on one hand, and we keep in touch via phone...rarely see each other these days. I retired in 2003, and like my privacy and my solitude. I have two sons that I am close to, and my brother's family that I visit, and who come visit me. My parents and siblings are all gone. After family, whatever other socializing I do is here on FR, and at my doctor appointments.
I have almost no friends......left. That’s the bad part of getting old. You don’t put any energy into making new ones because it hurts to lose them.
I think its also a case where the older you get your definition of friend narrows from the younger definition where you misclassified acquaintances as friends.
“As you get older you slough off friends.”
We’ve sloughed off quite a view the last 15 years or so starting with Obama. Then Hillary. Then Biden. Then Covid. Not a bad feeling. (Family, too.)