🦄 Startups & VC 2d ago · Sarah Mitchell

Psychology says people who reach their 60s without close friends aren’t the ones who lost everyone along the way — many of them made a series of quiet, deliberate choices over decades to stop investing in relationships that required them to perform, accommodate, or shrink, and what looks like loneliness from the outside is often the result of finally choosing themselves

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Psychology says people who reach their 60s without close friends aren’t the ones who lost everyone along the way — many of them made a series of quiet, deliberate choices over decades to stop investing in relationships that required them to perform, accommodate, or shrink, and what looks like loneliness from the outside is often the result of finally choosing themselves
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When we see someone in their 60s without a large circle of friends, we often assume something went wrong. Maybe they pushed people away. Perhaps they never learned how to maintain relationships. Or worse, they must be difficult to be around. But what if we’ve been reading these situations completely backward?
Bella DePaulo, Ph.D., Academic Affiliate in Psychological & Brain Sciences at UCSB, challenges this assumption directly: “The assumption seems to be that their solitude is n

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