Ayo

when people focus on a score rather than on improvement, they develop a fixed idea of their intellectual abilities. They come to see school not as a place to grow and learn, but as a place to demonstrate their intelligence by means of a number

The more profound truth behind friend clutter may be that, as a general rule, we don’t handle endings well. “Our culture seems to applaud the spirit, promise and gumption of beginnings,” writes the sociologist Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot in her absorbing new book, Exit: The Endings That Set Us Free, whereas “our exits are often ignored or invisible”. We celebrate the new – marriages, homes, work projects – but “there is little appreciation or applause when we decide (or it is decided for us) that it’s time to move on”. We need “a language for leave-taking”, Lawrence-Lightfoot argues, and not just for funerals. A terminated friendship, after all, needn’t necessarily signal a horrifying defeat, to be expunged from memory. One might just as easily think of it as “completed”.