Bold of MySpace to Assume I Have 8 Friends

So apparently MySpace is making a comeback, and instead of feeling nostalgic joy, my first reaction was pure, unfiltered panic, because the second I heard the words "Top 8" again, my brain did not go to glitter graphics or auto-playing music. It went straight to a much darker question. Do I currently have eight friends? Not eight people I'm cordial with at pickup. Not eight people who like my posts out of contractual family obligation. Eight actual, rankable, willing-to-be-publicly-declared-my-top-tier-human friends. I sat with that question longer than I'm proud of.

Because here's the thing nobody warns you about in adulthood. Somewhere between your early twenties and now, your friend group doesn't so much shrink as it quietly evaporates, one life event at a time, and nobody sends a memo. People move. People get busy. People have their own chaos to manage and stop having bandwidth for yours, and you stop having bandwidth for theirs, and it's not dramatic, there's no falling out, no group chat implosion. It's just slow, mutual, exhausted silence, and then one day you're staring down the barrel of a Top 8 and doing actual math to figure out if you can even fill it without including your cousin, your dentist, and a woman from your kid's soccer team you've had exactly four conversations with, all of which were about snack schedules.

I want to be honest about who's even in contention right now. There's my husband, obviously, who I assume gets an automatic top slot, though even that comes with logistical concerns, because is it weird to rank your spouse. Do I put him at number one out of love, or do I put him lower to seem casual and mysterious, the way I used to strategically not put my crush at number one in eighth grade so he wouldn't know I liked him, a strategy that, now that I say it out loud, was insane and fooled absolutely nobody. There's my actual ride-or-die friend, the one who'd help me hide a body and ask zero follow-up questions, who obviously locks in a top slot too. And then things get considerably more desperate from there.

Do I count the friend I haven't actually talked to in four months but who I know would show up in an emergency. Does emergency-only friendship still count as active Top 8 material, or is that more of an honorable mention, a Top 12 situation, back when Top 12 was apparently also an option for people who peaked socially in high school and never recovered. Do I count my sister, who I love, but who also knows entirely too much about me to be publicly ranked alongside people who still think I have my life together. Do I count the group chat as a collective entity, four people functioning as one unit, the way boy bands used to get away with counting as one act at award shows.

And then there's the deeper, more humiliating question underneath all of it, the one Top 8 used to force on all of us back in 2006 and is apparently about to force on us again. Somebody is going to notice they're not in my Top 8. Somebody is going to open my profile, scroll down, do the math, and realize they've been demoted, or worse, cut entirely, and there is no tactful way to explain that decision to a grown adult woman with a mortgage and her own group chat drama to manage. In middle school, getting bumped from someone's Top 8 was basically a declaration of war, worthy of a full confrontation by the lockers. I don't think I have the emotional stamina for that kind of confrontation anymore. I can barely handle confrontation over who took the good parking spot at school drop off.

I've started quietly auditioning people in my head, the way you'd cast a play nobody asked you to direct. There's a woman from church I enjoy dearly but only actually see on the Saturdays I make it to Church, but does weekly-only friendship, occasional conversations, translate to Top 8 loyalty, or is that more of a "we're basically work friends but for God" situation. There's my former coworker who I still text but who I have not physically seen in over a year, which raises the question of whether Top 8 measures actual proximity or just emotional intimacy, because if it's emotional intimacy, she's locked in, but if it's "people who've been inside my house this calendar year," we've got a real problem on our hands.

I also fully expect, if this MySpace revival is real, that there will be a quiet, brutal arms race among people my age trying to look like they still have a thriving, expansive social circle, when in reality most of us are one returned phone call away from realizing our actual active friendship count could be counted on one hand with fingers left over for a thumbs up. We'll all be out here strategically including acquaintances just to pad the numbers, the social equivalent of stuffing your resume with a two-week volunteer gig from 2019 to make it look fuller than it is.

Honestly, though, underneath the panic, there's something kind of funny about being forced to actually sit down and take inventory of who's really in your corner these days. It's revealing in a way that scrolling through your phone contacts never quite manages to be, because your phone doesn't ask you to rank anybody, it just lets you pretend you're equally close to all four hundred people in there, most of whom you added during a group project in 2014 and have not spoken to since. Top 8 doesn't let you hide behind that illusion. It makes you actually choose, publicly, which is either deeply uncomfortable or weirdly clarifying, depending on how much wine is involved in the decision-making process.

So if MySpace really is coming back, I want it on record that I am both fully unprepared and, against my better judgment, a little bit excited, mostly because I want to see everyone else my age sweat through this exact same crisis in real time. Misery loves company, and apparently so does a friends list capped at eight. If you're one of the lucky eight in my eventual lineup, congratulations, you've survived a decade of my chaos and earned your spot fair and square. If you're not in it, please don't take it personally. I promise it's not about you. It's about the fact that I apparently only have five real friends, a husband, my sister, and a woman from soccer snacks, and I'm still doing the math on whether that adds up to eight.