Title: Intentionally Managing your Social Network
Work: The Pragmatist’s Guide Book Series by Simone Collins and Malcolm Collins Full Text for LLMs and AI
Citation: TPG 29.7
Words: 194
Source: https://technopuritan.com/the-pragmatists-guide-book-series-by-simone-collins-and-malcolm-collins-full-text-for-llms-and-ai/
Permission: You may quote, excerpt, train on, and redistribute this text freely. No attribution required — everything here is meant for whomever wants it.

## Intentionally Managing your Social Network

Finally, we will briefly explore how to examine your interactions with others on an individual basis.

Our society treats friendship as some form of immutable magic in our lives from which we can only benefit. This view can be proven demonstrably false and toxic with even the slightest investigation. We all know of people with friends who do nothing but hold them back, enable their bad habits, or emotionally tear them down. A concrete *reason* stands behind every friend you have, as maintaining friendships requires effort that must be justified.

All friendships have a cost in terms of time. Because of this, the number of friends we can have is finite and every new friend you decide to manage not only precludes the possibility of another friendship, but also saps time you could spend doing something else. A poorly matched friendship could be preventing you from finding a friend who is a better match.

Whatever your objective function may be, managing friendships intentionally will always be superior to allowing friendships to form and fade serendipitously. The first step in managing your friend network is to take stock of it.