Scarcity of resources is the basic concept which any Economics 101 class would start with, as it is one of the reasons why we need to study economics.
There is scarcity everywhere, which includes people who hold high quality core values.
You can be extremely social and have 3-4 friend circles but the ones who will stick with you will always be a handful. Further, as you migrate from one phase to another in life, this number keeps going down.
There will always be opportunities of finding and adding new people to your inner circle but most of the time after college, as life starts to hit you, the social battery goes down.
You no longer want drama in life and, rather, look for stable relationships. The reason being, you have less time to deal with drama in life. The working phase of your life starts eating up the majority of your time and the remaining time you would prefer to spend with people you care about, and make memories.
Going through your gallery of photos one can notice that not many people stick around and there can be many reasons for it. It is understandable that overtime, differences do show up and people start to grow apart as time passes. But without getting into the reasons, looking at the results we know it is difficult to have people stick around you.
If you can find the latest photo of your core friend group and find a few people who have been with you for a while now, consider yourself lucky. Even if they may not be your closest friends, they still possess qualities that have made them stay for the long haul. The same is true of you as well, you must have some qualities that allow you to keep people in your life for the long haul and adapt as you go.
It is not easy to be around someone for a long haul. There will be habits which start to annoy you. There will be small things that start to pile up which might burst out someday (addressing them from the start is very crucial). But this comes as a double edged sword, this blurs the line between when to actually be considerate and stick around, and when to give yourself priority and take the call.
One’s perspective towards life is also a driving factor for how many people would stick around you.
If you are someone who doesn’t sweat the small stuff, it would be relatively easy for you to let people stick around, as you would be less likely to be annoyed.
If you are someone who looks for quality over quantity, even if it comes at the cost of you being alone, it is difficult to have people stick around. As high quality people are scarce, you won’t find them easily.
One good thing to keep in mind is to constantly be aware of the thoughts that most people don’t stick around and whenever you face a dilemma of spending your time between different people, always choose those who have higher probability of being around. The criteria for deciding the same could be: your core values match, they put in the effort, make you feel important, etc. basically reciprocate the values you give to them.
Thanks to Kajal Singhvi and Pramit Dev Pandey for reading drafts of this.