January 7, 2021:
It was decades before you realized certain of your long-time friends simply aren't very bright.
Artifact of endemic optimism. Or generosity, perhaps. Focus on good qualities while excusing the bad. Glass half full: it's not stupidity, it's the ambiguity of language, or an accident of education. Where anyways you read many, many more books.
Until one day some event, some frustrating interaction, forces confrontation with reality. That guy you've known for thirty years has from the beginning learned nothing new, not one thing, not because he's lazy or busy or overwhelmed but because he's afraid. He knows his limits and they are severe. Once he takes you there with him you lose all respect, until you literally wish he would stay away.
Or that girl you dated, with the thick accent she's unable to shed after forty years of Expatland, who from the beginning has been baffled by simple concepts. Striking memory: her look of bewilderment as you tried to explain air traffic control while watching Close Encounters of the Third Kind. It's not, as you'd imagined then, language barrier. It's dim-wittedness, combined with her own peculiarly narrow narcissism, a circle of self-reference keeping her from engagement with the world outside her personal solipsisms.
Until you self-isolate more and more radically, not entirely from depression but increasingly from lack of confidence in your ability to choose appropriate companions.
So you drop "friends" from social media, when they respond with laughter emojis to your attempts to communicate real truths of yourself, or pass along false and easily falsifiable memes. How many then are left? A handful.
Perhaps that's appropriate.
Perhaps your long, slow, stumbling maturation in the world is leading you to the true quality people. The handful who listen, share your compassion, understand your outrage, are loyal, read books, communicate well. Who can tell when you're joking and when you're deadly serious.
A handful, then. Perhaps that's appropriate.