Luigui Bleand: More People Around, Fewer Close By
Luigui Bleand writes in his diary about the loneliness that can come with success – when the phone rings more and fewer people ask how you are – about what the research really says, and about looking after the people who were there before.
Milan, Italy
MILAN, ITALY — When things start going well, the phone rings more, but fewer people ask how you are. It is the part of success nobody warns you about: it comes with more people around you and, sometimes, fewer people close to you.
I am not only talking about fame. It happens to the first one in the family who gets ahead, to the person who is promoted at work, to the one who sees a business grow. Suddenly there are more messages, more invitations, more people who want something from you. And in the middle of all that, you can feel alone.
There is a reason for that. In 2010, in Annals of Behavioral Medicine, the psychologists Louise Hawkley and John Cacioppo reviewed what was known about loneliness and drew a clear line: loneliness is not being isolated, it is feeling isolated. A person can live an almost solitary life and not feel lonely and, the other way round, lead an apparently full social life and feel lonely anyway, because what counts is the quantity and, above all, the quality of our relationships. The World Health Organization says something similar in the report of its Commission on Social Connection, published in June 2025: loneliness is the pain that comes from the gap between the connection we want and the connection we have. According to the WHO, it affects one in six people worldwide.
Having more people around does not multiply the ones who are close, either. In 2016, in Royal Society Open Science, the anthropologist Robin Dunbar analysed two online surveys of British adults, around 3,400 people in all. On average they had between 155 and 183 friends on Facebook. But in the first survey, of 2,000 people, they counted only 27.6% of them as genuine friends, and the circle they would turn to in a crisis was about four people. Dunbar concludes that there is a limit to how many close relationships we can keep, and that not even social media changes it.
I do not want to exaggerate, though. The research does not say that success leaves people alone. In 2015, in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, the psychologist Adam Waytz and three colleagues published eight studies, most of them with participants in the United States, and found the opposite of the popular idea: people who felt more powerful said they felt less lonely. The authors point out that they mostly measured power in the moment, in short experiments, not the power of someone who carries responsibility for years. And in 2012, in The Journal of Psychology, Sarah Wright compared managers and non-managers in three studies and found no difference in loneliness between them; the idea of being “lonely at the top”, she notes, rests mostly on anecdote. So I am not describing a rule. I am describing something that can happen, and that is worth seeing coming.
With success comes a doubt you did not need before: whether someone is there for you or for what you have. You cannot always tell, and that doubt isolates you too. You start protecting yourself, sharing less, choosing more carefully who you talk to. It is necessary, but it has a price.
There is a simple way to recognise the people who are close, and it is not only how they stand by you when things go badly, but how they take your good news. In 2006, in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, the psychologist Shelly Gable and two colleagues filmed 79 dating couples telling each other about good and bad things that had happened to them. Two months later, the way each partner had responded to the other’s good news was more closely linked to how the relationship was going, and to whether they were still together, than the way they had responded to bad news. It is an association, not proof of cause, and it concerns couples, not friends. Even so, it rings very true to me: the people who are truly glad when things go well for you are usually the ones who are close.
There are decisions nobody can make for you and doubts that are not easy to share, because you are expected to have everything figured out. That is where success weighs the most: not in the work, but in having no one to talk to about it.
What I have come to understand is that you have to look after the people from before, the ones who treated you the same when you had nothing. That it is worth staying the same person, because the people who really love you do not need you to change. And that success does not fill what only the people who love you, and God, can fill.
If things are going well for you today, call someone who was with you before they did. And if you know someone who is doing well, ask them how they really are. Sometimes it is the question nobody asks them.