Eight Chairs

A new way to see your social circle.

The Dive is my weekly essay to crack open a deeply personal topic in order to share resources, inspire and uplift. I employ the pay wall to sift earnestly interested readers from an audience of looky-loos. I think of you as friends around a dinner table working through life right alongside me. Welcome.

Here’s a thought I can’t shake: when you die, you can fit about eight people around your bed.

That’s it. Eight.

Move a chair, squeeze in a ninth if you must — but you get the picture. The circle at the end is small. Because it has always been small.

And most of us spend our whole adult lives not acting like it.

We collect people the way we collect things. Business cards, followers, Christmas card recipients, “my friend group.” We mistake a full calendar for a full life. We spread ourselves across forty acquaintances and wonder why we feel, at the end of a dinner party, inexplicably lonely.

I’ve been there. I think most of us have.

But here’s an exercise I’ve started doing…