While friendship works for most people, there are still a few of us out there (maybe it's just me) who thrives with as few human interaction as possible.

I remember growing up being forced by parents, relatives, and teachers to seek friendship, as it is the "normal" thing to do. Yet nobody observed or cared about how miserable I was wearing a mask everyday, attending suffocating social activities with an eternal dread.

I was raised before the digital age with not much to go by. Friendship under that setting was essential: it determines how much resource is available to a family. Forming friendship, no matter how genuine it seemed, always had a transactional undertone. If I was ill, my mom would take me to a doctor friend. If our fridge broke, my father would borrow a wrench from a mechanic friend. When we moved, my parents temporarily stored all of our belongings in a friend's apartment. And we reciprocated, of course. But at the end of the day, we were all just trying to save a dime.

Nowadays, it is no longer essential to survive the world with friends. The dwindling of the transactional need means that those of us who have been forced, by necessity or social pressure, to make friends finally have the courage and ability to say: No, I don't want to make friends; I never wanted friends; I want to be alone. Those statistics of decrease in friendship? Some maybe due to Covid, social media, or what not. But some might be due to us finally breathing the freedom of the shackle of friendship.

If you thrive in friendship, good for you; I wish you all the best. If you do not and also have won the birth lottery to afford not having friends, don't cave in to the pressure of what the majority of the society deems "normal". Live to the truest of yourself as much as you can, the rest, least of all people's opinions, don't matter.