The first step to gaining friends is to stop hanging out with people you don't actually like

Loneliness activates some panic reaction in us. We don’t sit back and think, “Hmm, what do I do?” In fact, we often don’t think about it at all. That’s because the implications of loneliness (“I am so worthless that nobody could possibly love me”) are so catastrophic that if we were to confront them, we’d need to destroy ourselves.

For this reason, our r…