I would invert the title a bit:

The quality of your life strongly depends on how many bad people you manage to avoid.

People are mostly OK and reasonable to deal with. Some super duper partner will not increase quality of your life 10 times. There is still work, kids and so on.

But bad partner or friend can easily make your life 10x worse, or even put you in jail.

> there are Diminishers and there are Illuminators.

Self-help bs. Normal people are too busy with their lives and paying bills , and will not do some monkey dance to "illuminate" your path.

Hard read but resonated with me. Late 20, living in rural area and introvert. It is very hard to make new friends/find love. Tech is no solution in my experience, getting out is somewhat harder since covid (get social anxiety much more easily). You end up just going through days mechanically.

Two pieces of advice I took to heart that have resulted in massive improvements to my life:

1) Do not associate with dishonest people, even if they're only dishonest about small things

2) Associate with people you admire, because you will slowly become them over a long enough period of time

Nearly every interpersonal problem that doesn't involve family (can't choose your family) comes down to one or both parties being dishonest or choosing to hang out with people they look down on in some way. In the past six years, almost every bit of "drama" that came my way was from someone I associated with before applying these principles.

Extroverts do this a lot: talk about how important people and relationships are to them, and then extrapolate that this must be true for everyone.

It certainly does not apply to everybody. But it's also not limited to extroverts. A psychologist shocked me a few years ago by calling me "an introverted people person." That sounded like an oxymoron to me, but it turned out to be quite accurate. It turns out introversion is not a simple binary thing.

Coming to understand that helped me figure out how to structure my social interactions in a much healthier way. In my case, that meant one-on-one interactions, not group settings. And I was lucky to have a number of wonderful people who were happy to have such interactions with me. So much of my joy comes from those interactions. I tested this by having dinner with three of them together at one point - they all loved it, and I was riddled with stress!

Great read for the beginning of a new year. Thank you. Humans have the capacity to become deep and wise. This essay is empirical evidence in support of that assertion! It seems, though, that something has to break for this transition to take place. I lost a friend to cancer when he was in the prime of life. It sent me into a spiral of surreal disorienting despair, and shattered the superficial model of life that I had been unconsciously following. It was the start of a different and deeper way of being for me. Reading this profound and thoughtful essay re-activated my awareness of this sensibility. Thanks for laying open the truth of your life. I hope that you have a good number of good days ahead of you. (To the extent that any growth or positive change happened, I would of course give it all back in an instant for my friend still to be with us.)

It's had it's ups and downs, but I really miss having a local meetup scene. There was a perpetual flux of people and always some promising new folks. I miss that dynamism!

It was already running a bit dry before COVID but there's near birthing happening and now and it's hard to imagine restartibg it. Even finding a place to gather seems like a huge challenge, much less money for pizza

The converse is true. Quality people won't want you in their life if you aren't a quality person.

That is not precisely true, in actuality.

It doesn't have to be precisely true, for all practical matters.

"Quality of people" is not only subjective, but a projection.

So project better?

Oh wow, thank you for sharing this.

High school cliques 4evah!!!!