I used to have numerous online friends whom I seldom contacted. But now the number of friends on my qq chat list is down to less than 30.

    Maybe there is something less sincere about real friendships. But maybe face-to-face interaction is also overrated. Throughout my life, I have had numerous people who I considered friends, but I have fallen out of contact with most of them.

    The people around me feel the same way about losing friendships as we get older. Part of this may be because, as China develops, an increasing number of people are moving far away from their hometowns to work.

    I have worked in Shantou, Chaozhou, Shenzhen and Guangzhou, and made friends along the way. It seems that nowadays, people make a higher number of friends, but do not necessarily have more sincere friendships.

    According to some academic research, a person can only have five close friends at the same time. So our friendship circles tend to be fluid.

    Several years ago I ran into a junior middle school classmate in my hometown. We both exclaimed, “How time flies!” It was nearly 20 years since we knew each other in the year of 1987. We both felt a little sad. We lost contact with each other though we had been very close.

    Just as the saying goes: “Everything is mutable.” This includes friendship. A good friend may become a rival or even an enemy, and vice versa. Sima Qian, a famous historian of the Western Han Dynasty (206 B.C.-A.D. 25) wrote in “Historical Records” that two talents, Zhang’er and Chen Yu, during the Qin Dynasty (221-206 B.C.), who had once been close friends, became deadly foes.