Friendship Can Save Your Life

A practical, science-backed guide to making friendship a lifelong practice and harnessing friendships to keep us alive and thriving for longer.

We spend enormous amounts of time and money trying to improve our health through diet, exercise, sleep, therapy, and wellness, but one of the most powerful contributors to our wellbeing is hiding in plain sight: Friendship. In Friendship Can Save Your Life, Modern Elder Academy co-founder Jeff Hamaoui argues that friendship isn’t something that simply happens to us. It’s a skill and a practice we can cultivate. Friendship is usually treated as a thing you have. Friending is something you do.

Once you understand friendship as something you actively do, you can master it as a transformational force. Hamaoui reveals that there are essentially three levels to friendship practice: 1) Friendship as belonging: I need friends. 2) Friendship as practice: I know how to create and sustain friendships. 3) Friendship as social energy: I can harness my capacity for friendship to support the people and systems around me. Hamaoui shows readers how to:

• Do the basics: learning how you naturally connect with others to build a portfolio of relationships that complement your strengths.
• Invest with intention: Learn how many friendships we can realistically sustain.
• Practice the essential skills: Better listening, meaningful questions, emotional safety, healthy boundaries, and when and how to let a relationship go.

Blending compelling science, candid personal stories, humor, and actionable tools, Hamaoui shares how you can deepen and repair existing relationships, set boundaries, navigate friendships that have run their course, and intentionally make friendship a transformative force in your life.