Your chances of achieving a truly saddening isolation are much enhanced if the pool of potential friendship candidates is exceedingly small. To accomplish this, all you need do is set the inclusion threshold high. Create a mental or, better still, a written list of your criteria for your friends, acquaintances, and partners. Narrow the highway of your acceptance to a knife’s edge.
Perhaps to be worthy of your regard, people must
This all but ensures that your social circle will be small. Do the math. Of a thousand randomly selected people from your community, how many share all of the above, and more (your opinion of cruise ships, your feelings about retirement, your love of birdwatching)? Watch how quickly your winnowing reduces the numbers. A thousand people are not enough; you are down to fractions within moments.
Become a truly discerning connoisseur of humanity, and you will eliminate virtually everyone from candidacy. If a tiny number remains, you can face a troubling prospect. Relationships are two-way. How likely is it that you measure up to their standards as well? If one in a thousand meets your exacting standards, and if he or she is as choosy as you, then approval will be mutual with only one in a million people.
Even if you do manage to find a social network this way, misery is likely. By marking out an insurmountable division between acceptable and unacceptable individuals, you can create the cozily claustrophobic sensation of being “we few, we lucky few” against the marauding inhuman hordes outside your social network—a feeling mimicked by films about the housebound survivors of zombie plagues.
It is seldom possible to sit one’s social candidates down for a truly extensive screening interview. Consequently, as you learn more about people, you will discover that most of them cross the line in one way or another, thus falling into the “unacceptable” camp. When this occurs, get rid of them. The discomfort of watching your circle shrink further (and the acrimony of their social ejection) may further darken your disposition. You can then spend solitary months gnawing on your resentment like a shih tzu with a twist of rawhide. They weren’t the people I thought they were.
Even if your friends and family do manage to pass your tests (a fact that alone should tell you that your standards are regrettably lax), you can demand top performance in their day-to-day interactions with you. Set high expectations for such imponderables as their generosity, the speed with which they respond to your e-mail, the timing of birthday acknowledgments, their ability to divine your good intentions without outward cues, and so on.
Above all, expect your associates to tolerate in you what you would never tolerate in them. Do not just hold them to the same standards you set for yourself. Set their bar much higher than your own. Whereas you are free to forget lunch dates, ignore their pleas for support, neglect birthdays, and turn conversations into lengthy monologues, insist that for them to do so would be a cardinal sin.
To help out, psychologists have invented the brilliantly destructive concept of unconditional positive regard. This is the belief that one’s feelings of affection should be constant and unwavering regardless of the behavior of the other person. Demand this of everyone you meet. To quote a recent “motivational” Internet meme, “Do not stay where you are tolerated; go only where you are celebrated.”
The genius of unconditional positive regard is that it is entirely mythological—something that even parents cannot wholeheartedly sustain for their children. Your friends will be unable to muster it on your behalf, and you will find yourself unable to produce it in return—thus enabling you to feel simultaneously aggrieved and inadequate.