28 February

I think the greatest mistake we made for the mental health of our entire population is to use a model of social life for popular kids, of lots of social mixing, as the ideal for all people to aspire to. We’re all brought up now told that this is the ‘normal’ life we need to learn how to live. That we need friends, and preferably a lot of them, or else we’ll be ‘lonely’ and depressed. If we’d followed the sort of advice in this article, I think the world would be an infinitely better place. True happiness only comes from individual resilience, which only comes from cultivating your self independently of what others think. It also makes you a much better social person, much less dependent on others. This should be the default that friendships and relationships then develop from. In reality the popular-kid model is a lie anyway. They’re not happier, as many Hollywood films have used as raw material. Popular kids can go through life entirely dependent on external validation for everything they think and do.