sunk cost fallacy exists in your friendships, too

pruning your inputs, protecting your growth, and outgrowing what no longer fits

Aug 05, 2025

I was sitting across from someone I'd known for ten years, watching her complain about the same relationship patterns she'd been cycling through since we met, and I felt something shift inside me—not anger, not judgment, just a quiet recognition that I was no longer the person who found this conversation interesting. She was still her, I was still me, but the space between us had somehow stretched into something unnavigable.

This is how most friendships end, I think. Not with explosive arguments or betrayals, but with the slow realization that you've grown in directions that no longer intersect. That the person across from you is operating from a version of reality you've quietly moved away from, and returning to that frequency feels like putting on clothes that technically still fit but make you feel like you're performing someone you used to be.

When you're someone who changes quickly—who's actively building something, whether it's a business, a practice, or just a more intentional way of being—this happens more often than you'd expect. Your values shift. Your nervous system recalibrates to something quieter and more focused. What used to feel like connection starts feeling like static. You leave conversations feeling more scattered than when you entered them, though you can't quite name why.

This is where the sunk cost fallacy reveals itself in its most insidious form.
We know the concept from economics: the tendency to continue investing in something simply because we've already invested so much, even when it's no longer serving us. But nowhere does this show up more painfully than in relationships. We've been friends since college. She was there for me during my divorce. We've been through so much together. All of which might be true. All of which might also be completely irrelevant to what your life needs now.

Because friendship isn't just a historical record of what you've survived together. It's an active, ongoing exchange of energy. It's the people you allow to shape your sense of what's normal, what's possible, what's worth discussing. And if that calibration is pulling you away from who you're becoming, it doesn't matter how many years they've been in your orbit. Long-term access to you should never be automatic.

I learned this the hard way in my twenties, especially when I first moved to Vegas. I tolerated so much friction in my relationships because chaos felt normal to me then. I didn't yet understand how profoundly my thinking, my ambition, my very nervous system were being shaped by who I surrounded myself with. I thought loyalty meant enduring whatever energy people brought to my life, regardless of how it left me feeling.

But as I've gotten older, the cost of misalignment has become impossible to ignore. When someone doesn't match your values, it doesn't just affect your mood—it affects your thinking. Your behavior. Your trajectory. It leaks into everything. You find yourself dumbing down your language, shrinking your standards, performing a version of yourself that feels increasingly foreign. And the exhaustion isn't just social; it's existential.
These days, I want to be around people who are building something—not just businesses, but better systems of thought, clearer ways of seeing, deeper relationships with reality itself. People who are metabolizing their experiences rather than endlessly recycling them. Who understand that growth isn't just about accumulating more, but about becoming more deliberate, more discerning, more alive to what actually matters.

This doesn't require perfection from anyone, least of all myself. But it does require orientation—some shared sense that life is not just something that happens to you while you're busy maintaining the status quo.

What this means practically is that I no longer hang onto friendships out of nostalgia. I don't confuse shared history with shared direction. And I've stopped making space for relationships that cost more energy than they contribute—not in drama or money, but in that subtle internal drag that comes from repeatedly code-switching back to a version of yourself you've outgrown.

The truth is, I don't need a compelling reason to let someone drift out of my life. I just need to trust my own data. I need to notice what happens to my energy before, during, and after we interact. That's information.

Letting go doesn't have to be dramatic. It doesn't require confrontations or carefully crafted boundary statements optimized for social media. Sometimes it's just a quiet adjustment—a shift in how often you reach out, a loosening of effort, a gentle redirect of your attention toward the relationships that actually nourish the person you're becoming.

You can be grateful for who someone was to you. You can appreciate the role they played in your story. And you can still recognize that role no longer exists in the current version of your life. This is responsible internal curation. Your life is being built with intention now, and intention requires choices about where you place your finite attention.

Not every relationship is meant to last forever. Some people are meant to walk with you for a season, to teach you something, to help you through a particular chapter. Recognizing when that season has ended isn't a failure of loyalty—it's an act of clarity about what your growth requires next.

The hardest part isn't the letting go. It's trusting that the space you create by releasing what no longer serves you will be filled by something better aligned with who you're becoming. And in my experience, it always is.

XO, STEPF