Success that costs you every friendship you started with is just a fancy kind of lonely.

Status does not substitute for company. People trade friendships for progress gradually, and each individual trade looks sensible, right up until the thing is achieved and nobody is left who knew you before it. The achievement is real and so is the quiet that comes with it. The second does not get cured by more of the first.

Friendships mostly die of neglect rather than conflict, so the maintenance is small and dull. Answer the message, go to the thing you do not feel like going to, hold on to two or three people who knew you at sixteen. That is nearly the whole job.