The people most positioned to give you advice—successful, experienced, willing to mentor—are systematically biased in ways that make their advice unreliable. Not because they're bad people. Because of how advice structurally works.
Adults want more and deeper friendships. They're getting fewer. The standard advice—put in more effort, be more intentional—misdiagnoses the problem. Friendship has always run on infrastructure: proximity, repetition, low-stakes contact. We've systematically removed all of it.
You have one bottleneck limiting almost everything important in your life. You are not working on it. You are working around it. The self-improvement industry exists largely to make that avoidance feel like progress.