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Bengaluru man uses Excel to track friendships, shares 6 years of data: 'New friends are negative ROI'
A Bengaluru man tracked friendships on Excel for 6 years, calling new relationships “negative ROI”.
A Bengaluru-based professional has sparked a discussion online after revealing that he spent 6 years tracking his friendships and analysing what he calls their “return on investment” (ROI), concluding that forming new close relationships is statistically inefficient.
In a detailed post on X, Pankaj said he built a system named “Ziya” that works like a personal customer relationship management (CRM) tool for people in his life. “It tracks context, patterns, interactions, how i feel after talking to someone,” he wrote.
“Yeah, I literally quantify friendships. If someone’s ROI stays negative long enough, I stop engaging,” he wrote, acknowledging that many found the approach “cold, dystopian” and transactional but arguing that “pretending time is infinite is worse”.
Tracking friendships like data
According to Pankaj, his 6-year dataset suggests that building one meaningful friendship requires a significant time investment. He estimated that moving from first contact to a real conversation takes roughly 8-12 hours, while establishing trust demands about 45-60 hours over 3-6 months. Reaching emotional vulnerability, he said, can require another 80-120 hours across 12–18 months. In total, a “bootup cost” of about 128-192 hours for a single friendship, he calculated.
Maintenance, he added, is equally demanding. About 30-40 hours annually for regular contact, 12-15 hours for life events such as birthdays and celebrations, and around 7 hours to keep each other updated on major life changes. That places the yearly commitment at approximately 45-65 hours per person, according to Pankaj.
Reflecting on his last 6 attempts at forming new friendships between 2019 and 2025, Pankaj said those efforts consumed roughly 354 hours yet resulted in contacts who are “now just names” in his phone.
‘Uncomfortable realisation’
One of his “uncomfortable realisations,” he wrote, was that people have limited emotional bandwidth.
“I can maintain roughly 5-8 deep relationships and 10-12 meaningful ones max,” he said, adding that every new addition either pushes someone else out or dilutes existing bonds.
Pankaj noted he currently has 4 close friends, each known for 8-12 years, and spends about 400 hours annually nurturing those ties. He argued that the same time spread across newer friendships would likely produce only surface-level connections.
His calculations also suggested that a new friendship formed at age 25 carries a 72–73% chance of failing within 2 years. Factoring in time spent building and maintaining the relationship, he estimated an “expected cost” of around 228 hours.
“People just keep trying to make new friends because that’s what you’re ‘supposed to do.’ I also used to think the same, but now the math does not make sense anymore,” he wrote.
Probability versus possibility
Running what he described as rough probability estimates, Pankaj claimed there is only about a 4% chance that a new person is genuinely different from one’s existing network, a 31% chance of deep connection, and a 27% chance the relationship survives beyond 2 years.
He stressed that the figures come from a small personal dataset and should be viewed as “perspective, not proof.”
“After 23, my friend roster is almost closed for new additions. My default is no. Someone has to be statistically exceptional to enter,” he wrote, adding that he prefers investing energy into existing relationships, skills and health.
How did social media react?
The post quickly drew mixed reactions online, with some users criticising the analytical lens while others found it thought-provoking.
“A very weird way to look at life if you calculate time taken to talk with anyone on an ROI basis - only talk to people if it's mutually fun for both, and if it's that, you shouldn't expect any more "roi" from that..Conversations are not a means to an end imo,” one user wrote.
“Interesting insights here. Math was brutal but it is what it is. Thanks for writing this. And ofcourse its understandable that it felt disturbing to read. The takeaways for those who have good friends is to double down and for those who don't is to be wiser i guess,” commented another.
“The real effort is tracking the time spent on these things haha.. I did something similar when I was searching for life partners! Fun activity that,” shared a third user.
