I don’t think most of us are lonely. I think we’re obsessed with a friend group that doesn’t exist and never did.

You know the one. Six people who met in college and still get dinner every Thursday. They have a group chat that’s actually active. They take trips together. They show up with soup when someone’s sick. They exist in every sitcom, every wedding toast, every podcast where someone casually mentions “my girls” like it’s the most natural thing in the world.

This friend group is fiction. But we’ve stared at it so long we’ve started to believe it’s the baseline.

I’ve started asking people who tell me they’re lonely to list everyone they actually talked to that week. Not texted. Talked to. The list is always longer than they expect. The coworker they vented to. The neighbor who held the elevator. The cousin who calls on long drives. The college roommate they texted when something reminded them of that one night in second year.

None of these feel like they count. Because none of them are The Group.

We’ve built this hierarchy where anything less than constant, deep, decades-long intimacy doesn’t register as real friendship. The colleague you’ve eaten lunch with for three years? Doesn’t count, you only talk about work. The person you text memes to but never see? Doesn’t count, not meaningful. The mom from school pickup you genuinely like? Doesn’t count, you don’t know her husband’s name.

But what if all of that is friendship? What if we have more than we think and we’ve just been trained to disqualify it?

My grandmother had her kitty party ladies. She didn’t know where half of them lived. She had the woman she borrowed dhaniya from. The aunty at the gurudwara she sat next to every week for thirty years without once visiting her house. If you asked her whether these women were her best friends she would have looked at you like you were insane. They were just her people.

Somewhere between her generation and ours, we decided that wasn’t enough. We decided adult friendship had to look like the friendships we had at twenty-two, when everyone lived in the same hostel and had nothing but time.

But we’re not twenty-two anymore. We’re tired. We work too much. We live in cities designed for cars, not for running into people. We moved for a job and then again and now the people who know us best are scattered across time zones. We’re not lonely because we’ve forgotten how to be friends. We’re lonely because we’re stretched thin and maintaining intimacy with whatever energy we have left.

I also think some of what we call loneliness is actually something else. Sometimes it’s sadness for a friendship that ended and now everything else feels pale. Sometimes it’s the ache of being around people who know you but don’t really know you. And that kind of loneliness doesn’t get fixed by more friends.

The loneliest I’ve ever felt was at a party surrounded by people I was supposed to be close to, realizing none of them knew what was going on in my life. Not because they didn’t care. Because I hadn’t told them. I’d decided friendship meant people should just know, just show up, just sense when you needed them. When they didn’t, I held it against them.

I wonder how many of us are doing that. Sitting with people who would show up if we asked, feeling abandoned because we haven’t asked and they haven’t guessed.

Maybe we’re not lonely. Maybe we’re comparing our lives to a fantasy and calling the gap a fundamental brokenness. The woman you complain to in the office kitchen is a friend. The person who likes all your posts but never comments is a friend. The school mom, the gym guy, the cousin who only texts on festivals.

They’ve been counting this whole time. We just forgot to add them up.