Friendships

A few years ago I went back to school for a master's in public health. I wanted to understand the intricasies of how clinical evidence is generated: how a claim becomes a finding, and a finding becomes practice. What I didn't expect was the loneliness data. It has the shape of an epidemic, especially among men, and it drags a long tail of consequences: heart disease, depression, dementia, earlier death, with mortality risks that sit in the same neighbourhood as smoking. I went looking for methodology and found a crisis nobody was treating.

The finding stayed abstract until it wasn't. For the past three years I've lived mostly away from London, which is home. Boston, then San Francisco, then New York. Each city meant starting from zero: no standing dinners, no one to call on a bad Tuesday, none of the shorthand that takes a decade to build. What these years have taught me is that friendship in adulthood isn't something you have. It's something you do. It gets initiated, scheduled, followed up on, or it doesn't exist.

Aristotle divided friendship into three kinds. Friendships of utility, where each side gets something. Friendships of pleasure, built on fun. And friendships of character, where you value who someone is and wish them well for their own sake. The first two dissolve once the use or the fun runs out. The third endures, and it delivers the utility and pleasure anyway, as side effects. Some of my best hires at Taxo came through friends. Not because I befriended anyone to build a pipeline, but because people who know you well can see what you're building and who belongs in it. The richest networks accrete this way, around genuine curiosity about other people.

I've watched the opposite too. People who stop making the effort don't collapse. They wither, quietly. The world narrows to work and a screen, and without other minds pressing on your own, your ideas calcify and your read goes stale. The decline shows up everywhere at once, in the career and in the body. Fresh perspective is how you stay accurate, and it only comes from people standing somewhere you don't.

There's a fashionable idea in ambitious circles that social life is a distraction, a leak in the machine, something to minimise in service of the work. This misunderstands what adult friendship is. It doesn't mean bars and blackouts. It can mean dinner at your own table, a long walk, a running argument about a book. Humans are social creatures in the plain biological sense. We regress without contact, and the regression is steepest for the people most tempted to skip it: the ones far from home, in unfamiliar cities, working jobs that eat their evenings.

Consider this a small call to initiative. Think of someone you find interesting, a friend you've let drift, or a stranger whose work you admire. Reach out. Host them for dinner. Ask real questions and stay for the answers. Do it again next month. A beautiful friendship is mostly just this, repeated. From the outside this looks inefficient. It is the infrastructure of a good life, and its returns arrive from directions you cannot imagine.