Summary

“Let’s start,” the author says, “with the moment I realized I was already a loser, which was just after I was more or less told that I was destined to become one” (1). The author then describes how he, a newspaper journalist, was offered an assignment that an editor thought he would be perfect for. The assignment was to explore and write about the crisis in modern friendship – i.e., that people of middle-age were suffering issues with mental and physical health because of a lack of friendship. The author describes thinking about whether to take the assignment, and then realizes both that he truly is middle-aged, and that he had not been as close with his friends as he thought he had. He adds that if the editor was right, and that he was perfect to research and write this story, he...