No one outside of high school has six friends.

Me, a guy with maybe a dozen friends I hang out with on a weekly basis, whistling past the graveyard of loneliness

There’s a reason this is called a “dream”.

One trick to living in a cul de sac with six of your closest friends is to meet your neighbors and become friends with them. I’ll say that COVID really helped me with this, personally, because during the peak I was just out on the driveway or walking the local trails trying not to go stir crazy and… so was everyone else. Pretty soon we were doing impromptu parties on the driveway and yoga on the lawn and whatever else we could to avoid the isolation of a pandemic.

But you don’t need a killer virus to wave to your neighbors, say hi, and strike up a conversation. And there’s a compounding effect. When two people are out talking, you’re likely to pick up a third. When five people are hanging out at the end of a day, it can quickly become ten or more.

If it’s an instinctual response to wish for this kind of thing, it shouldn’t be hard to imagine people gravitating towards these relationships IRL.