WHY DO WE LOSE OUR FRIENDS WHEN WE GET OLDER?

I have always being extremely sociable, so as time went by, and I realized that the people I was socializing with were not really friends but competitors, I felt lost. Some of them I had really grown to love as I did my teenage friends when I was in school, without perceiving that deep down their heart there was more envy than appreciation. If like J.P. Sartre stated our life is the result of the choices we make, I must have made the right ones because in the third stage of my life I feel that things are as they should be; in other words, I don’t feel the urge to compete with anybody. Even my divorce, which in the beginning I had difficulties overcoming, now seems to be what needed to happen for me to start a life that made more sense. The dark side of this bliss is the fact that most of the people I know are not in the same situation I am at; a lot of them have reached this life stage with regrets and a deep disorientation regarding the meaning of their journey on earth. As a result, my relationship with them has become strained and uninteresting; on my end, that means less friends with whom to share my life. On the positive side, this sudden isolation gives me the opportunity to understand that relationships start and end, and that new relationships are always coming our way. Hopefully, this time competition and envy will be out of the question.