I ask the executives I work with when they last made a real friend. They get quiet. Almost without fail, the names they come up with are people they haven't seen in twenty years — old roommates, or people they knew before the striving started. That is the warning sign. And I recognize it, because it used to be me. At one point in my life, I was surrounded by people all day. My phone never stopped ringing. My calendar was packed. But I had never been lonelier. I would not have admitted it at the time. But if something truly hard had happened — the kind of thing you don't put in a meeting agenda — I'm not sure I would have known who to call. There is a lie strivers tell themselves about friendship, and the lie sounds reasonable: I'm in a sprint right now. There will be time for real friends later. I've heard versions of this from people in their twenties through their fifties. The essence never changes; only the "later" gets pushed further. But friendship doesn't work the way the striver imagines. The people who become your friends-for-life are the people you accumulate time with — through the moves, the boring Tuesdays, the bad years. You can't fast-forward to them. You can't acquire them at fifty-five the way you acquire a second home. The reason the names always come from college is that college was the last time friendship was the default mode of their lives. They were thrown together with people in proximity over years, with nothing competing for their attention. They didn't have to choose; the friendship happened on its own. After college, friendship stopped being free. It started costing time, and the deliberate decision to make somebody a priority. Most strivers stop paying that cost and then, decades later, wonder why the bench is empty. Friendship compounds, and so does its absence. Striving is a fine thing — I'm pro-striving. The mistake is treating friendship as something that sits outside the striving, a hobby for the off-hours. By the time the urgent work slows down, the people who would have become your friends-for-life have spent those decades becoming somebody else's. The friends you'll need at fifty-five are the people you are postponing this week. Do not wait for friendship to become convenient. Pick up the phone and make the plans now.