toxic friends — 1 thorough investigation

friends, in the toxic flavor, is the section of my life i have been quietly trimming since about 2021 with the steady patience of a man pruning a hedge that hates him personally. the hedge is winning. i keep pruning anyway.

i am writing this from the desk on a monday, 3:47pm, while carla sits in the all-hands two floors up and the building hums like an appliance nobody asked for. i have approximately 38 minutes before someone notices my screen is not the spreadsheet it should be. that is plenty.

the audit lives in my head and on a thing i call the digital fridge — a notes app i will explain in a minute — and the audit is short, because honest audits usually are.

writing this from the desk. carla is upstairs. the all-hands runs long because somebody made slides.

the working theory, before i get into the categories, is that the entire concept of a friend group is a slow-motion piece of gaslighting dressed up as belonging. you sit in the booth, you laugh at the joke about you, you go home and rinse the joke off in the shower. you ask: was that a joke. nobody answers. the booth has moved on.

1. toxic friends, the working set

my working set of toxic friends is nine, which is two more than i would like and seven more than is strictly defensible. i counted them this morning on a yellow pad while pretending to read an email from procurement. the pad is also where i keep my outbound list, which is shorter and meaner.

nine is the number that survives any honest count of toxic friends i still text back. they are not strangers. they are people who have keys to small rooms in my head and use them on weekends.

i would like to claim i have a system. i do not. what i have is a tendency to delete a contact, screenshot the deletion, and then re-add them under a slightly different spelling, because i am a the_idiot in matters of social hygiene and i want to be clear about it.

this is roughly the rhythm: tuesday i decide. wednesday i waver. by friday someone sends a meme and the count is back to nine.

2. the digital fridge where i posted the audit

the digital fridge is a notes app pinned to the home screen. i call it that because every important thing in a real fridge is a magnet holding up a piece of paper nobody wants to read. the digital fridge holds: utility passwords, a list of things i meant to return, two recipes i will never make, and the audit of toxic friends. they are all magnets. none of them are fridge.

i opened the app at 11:47am to add a new entry. the entry was a single name and a single sentence: “sends pity at scale, expects gratitude in cash.” that is the format. one name, one sentence. if you cannot name the toxicity in one sentence, you do not get to keep them on the fridge.

the fridge has thirty-one entries. nine of them are people i still see. twenty-two are people who i kept on the fridge for the same reason people keep wedding photos: evidence that a thing happened and i was, briefly, a worse version of myself.

i mention this because the fridge is the closest i come to journaling. the closest i come to therapy is a rerun of frasier at 1am on a thursday with the volume just high enough to make the apartment feel populated.

3. the voicemail full of friends i never called back

my voicemail has been full for eight months. it crossed into full territory back in september and has stayed full out of inertia and a small philosophical commitment. i have not deleted a single message, including the one from the man who calls, which i never picked up and which i suspect is about something with letters and serif font.

the voicemail is, in a sense, the inverse of the digital fridge. the fridge is the friends i kept because i wrote them down. the voicemail is the friends i kept because i could not bring myself to delete them. both are storage solutions for cowardice, and i defend both.

there are seventeen messages in the voicemail. five are from the same friend, who is on the audit. two are from the ex, who is, by latest report, with the volvo guy and his correctly seated children. one is from a number i do not recognize, and i have decided the number is also a friend, in the way that the universe declines to comment but still leaves a note.

this is the part where a normal investigation would suggest you call them back. i am not going to suggest that. i am going to suggest that a voicemail full of friends you never called back is itself a kind of friendship, just one with the volume turned all the way down. mike says this is unhealthy. mike has not filed a tax return since the year people stopped saying “the cloud” with capital letters.

4. the kinds of toxic friends, briefly listed

i have grouped the working set into five textures, because grouping is the closest a person gets to control. these are not types in the clinical sense. these are types in the sense of bar-stool taxonomy. that is the only sense i trust.

texture one — the scoreboard. they keep a running tally of who texted last and they will, given a third drink, recite it. you do not exist to them as a person. you exist as a row.

texture two — the weather. they are warm in march and cold in november and there is no reason for the change other than a season they refuse to name. you adjust your jacket. you keep adjusting.

texture three — the audit. they will, without warning, audit your life out loud. your apartment, your job, your hot takes, your unopened mail pile. they leave with the sense that they helped. they did not.

texture four — the favor bank. every interaction is a deposit they will withdraw later, with interest, in a context you did not sign up for. one of them once asked me to drive a car across two states. the car had no plates.

texture five — the echo. they only appear when you are thriving and disappear the second you are not. they do not mean to. they have been trained, by an algorithm or a parent, to attend only to peaks. valleys make them nervous. the valley is where most of life is lived.

i’d remind you that a friend who needs you to lie to keep them comfortable is, in the practical sense, a liar by proxy. a liar in your social circle is a liar at your dinner table. you are not the auditor. you are the buffet.

A FRIEND. SHOULD NOT. REQUIRE. AN AUDIT.

5. verdict — the friends are friends, the toxicity is the friend group

the verdict, after thirty-eight minutes of work and one fresh entry on the digital fridge, is that none of the nine are uniquely toxic. they are perfectly fine in isolation. it is the friend group itself that does the damage. the booth, the loop, the inside joke that does not include you on the third repeat.

i am told “showers over 4 minutes are theatre”. i hold this take. i hold it because the same logic applies to social warmth. anything past four minutes of forced laughter is theatre, and the audience is your therapist and the lighting is your microwave at 1:14am, which, to be specific, is the seventh microwave i have killed and the only one whose digital clock i still trust.

the nine are not getting cut. that is the honest part. they are getting reorganized into folders i do not look at, which is the digital version of moving a yoga mat under the couch. the mat is still there. the yoga is not happening. the friendship continues to exist as a magnet on a fridge nobody opens.

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