About a month ago, I wrote about the importance of applying Garbage Collection to your circle of friends. Deleting toxic people who only fill up your mental memory. Many responded to that post, some agreed, but quite a few also felt it was too cold and transactional.

Today, I want to give an honest review of what happens after you actually commit that change to the master branch of your social life.

The first phase after you cut off toxic friends is loneliness. This is very normal. In the programming world, when you have just deleted thousands of lines of dead code, the file size of your project shrinks drastically. You feel weird, like something is missing. You scroll through your WhatsApp contacts and realize the group that used to be noisy is now quiet. At this point, many people regret it and try to revert their commit. They apologize and return to that toxic circle.

But, the loneliness in the initial phase is not an error. It is the empty space (free memory) that you just acquired.

If you can hold yourself back from reverting, you enter the second phase: performance improvement. You start to realize that your life is much lighter. You no longer have to listen to the drama of people who borrow money but never pay it back, or friends who show up two hours late without feeling guilty when invited to hang out. Your brain's CPU, which used to handle their drama, can now be allocated to running things you like. You start having time to finish side projects, read books, or just sleep soundly without being disturbed by drama texts at two in the morning.

In this phase, you experience what is called zero-cost abstraction in friendship. You can still have friends, still socialize, but without the emotional cost (overhead) that drains you.

The third phase, and this is the most crucial, is rebuilding. Because you now know what it feels like to have a clean and neat friendship codebase, your standards will automatically rise. If someone new wants to enter your circle, you will be much stricter in reviewing their friendship PR (Pull Request). You will not easily give admin access to random people. You will look for people who genuinely add value (modular, reusable, and have good character documentation).

Some people might view this as arrogance. But trust me, being picky with friends in your twenties is not arrogance, it is called survival instinct. The friends you keep now are the environment variables that will shape your mindset and future career.

If you want your life to run smoothly without sudden crashes, never be afraid to refactor. Temporary loneliness is a very cheap price compared to living in an endless drama simulation. Clean architecture is expensive, but it is worth it.

Khay