— Tyler Perry, through the character Madea
The filmmaker Tyler Perry popularized a way of sorting relationships that's held up remarkably well: some people drift in and out like leaves, some hold like branches until weight is applied, and a very few settle in like roots.
It's a useful frame for something the data keeps confirming — that connection has gone up while depth has gone down.
The loneliness numbers deserve a careful reading. Cigna's widely-cited 2020 survey found roughly seven in ten millennials and eight in ten Gen Z respondents scoring as lonely. That's a commercial survey using the UCLA Loneliness Scale, not a clinical census, and the threshold it uses is generous — which is part of why the figures run so high. But the direction is corroborated by better-designed work: the U.S. Surgeon General issued a formal advisory on social isolation in 2023, and multiple independent surveys find the number of Americans reporting no close confidant has risen sharply since the 1980s.
The most-quoted version of that trend — that Americans without a single non-family confidant jumped from 36% to 53% between 1985 and 2004 — comes from a General Social Survey analysis that other researchers later challenged on methodological grounds. The decline is real. Its exact size is disputed.
What's clearer, and more useful: a large contact list does not predict low loneliness. Research consistently finds that people with many frequent contacts can still be deeply lonely, and people with few contacts often aren't. Volume isn't the variable.
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Leaves move with whatever wind is blowing, and when the season turns, they're gone.
Most of the people in your life are leaves, and that's normal. The acquaintance from a networking event, the person you talk to constantly in one group chat and never again after it dies — they bring some fun, some information, and then circumstances shift and they drift.
Digital life has multiplied this category enormously. Social platforms promise closeness and largely deliver performance instead — curated versions of people's lives that create the feeling of intimacy without the substance of it.
This connects to something sociologists have understood for decades. Mark Granovetter's work on weak ties showed they're genuinely valuable — they're how most people find jobs and new opportunities, precisely because they connect you to networks your close friends aren't in. What weak ties don't provide is emotional support. A wide acquaintance network brings you ideas. It won't hold you up.
Leaf relationships can disappoint you if you expect more from them than they're built for. But they're also a legitimate layer of a healthy social life — not a failure of one.
The skill is not over-investing emotionally in them. As Perry put it, these are people who show up for a season. Getting angry when they leave is a category error. Letting them go is the correct response.