There is a sadness in the pursuit of becoming. This melancholy blooms not as a sharp ache from a sudden loss, but more as a slow dissolution of esteemed bonds that once seemed shatterproof. The anguish arrives quietly while you are occupied in the trenches; it unpacks softly, never making a sound that alerts you to its presence. You remain oblivious, live with it, and even appreciate the focus it brings to your work… that is, until you realize the separation from others, people who were once friends and loved ones. You had told them about this work, this mission you had. They even cheered and encouraged you to go forward. You were certain they understood the toll as much as you experienced it. You had their support… and love. Days pass, then months, and years. You suddenly raise your head out of the hole you’ve been dug into, toiling. You look, and there’s no one around. There were no dramatic departures and scarcely any hard feelings. Just unreturned calls and conversations that now ring shallower at every occasion where they once ran deep. “We” is gradually replaced with “I used to know someone who…”

I think of my old friends a lot, usually at inconvenient hours when trying to bring my mind to rest. We were inseparable once, bound by nothing more substantial than faith, mutual care, love, and shared commitment to be better people. We talked about our aspirations and hopes. We looked at the future with wide eyes. There were no calculated agendas to our gathering, no networking opportunities disguised as friendship, no convenient exchanges of nice-sounding values; none of those things. We were just ourselves, together, and that was more than enough; it was all that mattered to us. However, missions are harsh taskmasters and often demand total fealty and solitude. Not the romantic kind some biographies profess, but the grinding, necessary, and deflating isolation of someone reconstructing themselves from blueprint to building. Each floor added to this missionary tower appears to lift me further away from the very ground where those friendships took root. The view improves with every elevation story climbed, certainly, but the voices removed from the structure grow fainter and fainter.

i. Mission Architecture and Arithmetic
The pursuit of one’s life mission, whether it is building a company, mastering an art, solving a profound problem, or even choosing to lead a life of radical simplicity, demands a deliberate application of the requisite architecture to practice that lifestyle. Days are restructured around objectives. Thoughts perpetually returning to unsolved puzzles or tactical plans. Energy is strictly rationed with the precision of a desert traveler measuring water for the duration of the journey. This careful architecture, necessary as it may be, becomes gradually incompatible with the spontaneous and present-focused rhythm of social life and friendship. This is where the cruel mathematics of actualization enter: time spent mastering the craft becomes time not spent on relationships and friendships. Energy invested in building something meaningful is energy taken away from the simple pleasure of being present with others. We may try to juggle thoughtfulness and efficiency at the same time – sending gifts in place of calls and letters just to indicate that we are still thinking of our loved one, even though consumed in the drudgery of work. We tell ourselves we’ll reconnect better “when things slow down a bit,” but that’s the rub: things never quite slow down, no, they in fact accelerate, pulling us further and further away into distant orbits our old friends can neither relate to nor care to understand, since their own journeys and trajectories chart toward a different destination. Conversations are typically the first to change. Where once hours could be spent dissecting and discussing absolutely nothing substantive – and loving every nuance of the waste of effort – now there are unwanted silences and unexpected awkward pauses. My struggles are too specific and embedded in contexts they don’t share, as are their own endeavors to me. Their joys feel distant, part of a life I might have once appreciated or lived but have since moved away from in pursuit of my purpose. Our gatherings and conversations become forced attempts at being translators of our own existence to people who are removed from it; we exert ourselves explaining rather than sharing; we are performing connection rather than experiencing it. This deviation of interests isn’t just about family life (spouse and child rearing), or achievements, or new undertakings. No. It’s about the fundamental reorientation that occurs when individuals have committed to different paths of becoming and must now live in the realities of their travel, often without the people they wish most could have remained part of their lives through that journey. It is the civil engineer who gradually loses common ground with friends who gather at bars; the entrepreneur who now speaks a language increasingly foreign to those with steady paychecks and predictable weekends; the artist or athlete, who is consumed by visions only they can see and becomes lost at gatherings where others discuss mortgages and school districts. There is an overall desire to remain interested, but the inclination couldn’t be further away.

ii. Conflict of Purpose
Here lies the paradox: the very meaning we seek through our missions – that noble dedication to something greater than momentary happiness – often costs us the relationships that once provided happiness without effort or intention. We trade the ease of natural connection for the weight of purpose, accepting both the misery and bliss that meaning brings. I find myself wondering about that eternal question posed to time travelers: knowing what you know now, would you choose differently? Would I trade my actualization for those friendships, remain frozen in that amber of shared simplicity? The question tortures precisely because both answers feel like a betrayal – either of self or of others, of potential or of love.

iii. Universal Exile
Every time I think of my own exile from friends and loved ones, I often take a closer look at what other people are doing – maybe I might learn a better way. Perhaps I can find some way to eat my cake and still have it – pursue my calling and still be permanently rooted among friends from every stage of my life. Yet here’s what strikes me as I zoom out from my own story: this geography of separation is not unique to the obviously ambitious. Consider the woman who chooses sobriety in a culture built on social drinking – she, too, experiences the slow fade of friendships that centered on bars and wine. The couple who decides against having children find themselves gradually excluded from a community organized around school events and playdates. The person who leaves their religion loses not just faith but an entire social architecture. Therefore, even the pursuit of simplicity itself can be just as isolating a mission. The friend who moves to the countryside for a quieter life discovers that their urban friends visit less and less – she overhears jokes about her choice to live in the middle of nowhere. The one who chooses contentment over ambition in a group that values drive finds themselves equally alone, just on the opposite shore of the same river. Alas, we are all travelers, faced with that eternal dilemma: do we remain in the quaint town where we’ve found love and belonging only to risk being left behind by those who do leave, or should we continue toward a destination that calls to something essential within us and risk leaving that love and belonging behind? To stay is to live with a hole in our heart where purpose should be. To leave is to carry forever the loss of treasured connections severed. Whether you choose the stay or leave, the risk of secondary isolation even within your community of belonging remains inherent.

iv. Grief That Strengthens
There are no clean resolutions to this tension, no wisdom that makes the choice painless. We become stronger, yes – independence is its own muscle, built through repetitive lifting of solitude. We become more ourselves, certainly – stripped of the social mirrors that once reflected and shaped us. Still, strength and selfhood are not analgesics for loss. Sometimes I imagine parallel universes where different choices were made. In one, I stayed close to those early friends, chose presence over purpose, happiness over meaning. We still gather weekly, still laugh at jokes now calcified into a ritual. In another universe, I found some impossible balance, maintained both connections and calling without compromise. In this universe, however, which in the end is the only one that matters to my existence inside it, I am here, feeling both accomplished and alone in ways I couldn’t have imagined in those innocent days of purposeless connection. Being busy does not afford me the luxury of feeling lonely, but I do feel the absence of easy laughter and other people I sorely miss. The grief is real and deserves acknowledgment. So does the growth. Perhaps maturity means holding both truths simultaneously: that our becoming requires separation, and that separation wounds even when necessary. That the friends we leave behind were not meant to be abandoned, but simply could not follow where we were headed. That they, too, are on journeys requiring their own departures and distances.

v. Unending
In the end, we are all walking away from something beloved toward something necessary. Whether that necessity is influence or simplicity, creation or contemplation, connection or solitude – the leaving is the same. We grieve the same losses, just dressed in different circumstances. I think of friendship now as something more complex than proximity or shared experience. Perhaps true friendship, the kind that survives these necessary divergences, is simply the mutual recognition that we are all in exile from simpler times, all choosing between different forms of incompleteness. Those who understand this can love across distance and can celebrate another’s becoming even when it means separation. The laughter we shared without agenda remains real and precious even if it now exists only in memory and curated occasions. The person I was then, capable of such uncomplicated connection, remains part of who I am now, even if buried beneath the layers of mission, battles, and purpose. The friends I’ve lost to distance and divergence remain friends in some essential way – we just serve now as markers of each other’s journey and proof of how far we’ve traveled from who we once were. Perhaps this is enough. Perhaps it has to be. The alternative – to never grow, never pursue, never become – seems like a different kind of death, one that preserves the body while starving the soul. It’s cowardice. So we continue, each on our separate paths, carrying our griefs and gratitudes in equal measure, becoming ourselves at the cost of who we were together. The mission continues. The heart remembers. Both realities coexist, neither canceling the other, both essential to the complex arithmetic of a life fully lived.

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