Apparently, there’s a “five-year stranger” theory floating around the social media.   There’s the idea that most of the people in your life right now will be strangers in five years. Cheery, right?

At first glance, it feels a little dramatic. A little doomsday for your contact list. But then you pause and mentally scroll.

Old coworkers. That person you used to text every single day. The “we should definitely stay in touch” crowd. The group chats that went eerily silent. The names that once felt permanent and now feel archived.

It’s not that anything catastrophic happened. No big fight. No cinematic betrayal. Just time doing what time does best. Its quietly editing.

And if most of your world is built around work, the theory starts to feel less like a hot take and more like basic math. Jobs change. Teams reshuffle. Priorities pivot. The people you saw more than your own family slowly become LinkedIn sightings and the occasional “like” on a life update you weren’t invited to.

Family, for the most part, sticks. They’re the original group chat you didn’t opt into. They persist, evolve, annoy, love, and repeat. But everyone else? They’re on a more fluid contract.

Renewable. Or not.

There’s something oddly freeing about that.

Because if many relationships are seasonal then maybe we can stop forcing permanence where it doesn’t naturally exist. Maybe not every connection is meant to be lifelong. Some are meant to be intensely right now.

Colleagues who get you through a chaotic chapter. Friends who belong to a specific version of you.
People who matter deeply for a while.

And then drift.

Not failures. Just completed arcs.

Of course, there are exceptions the rare ones who cross contexts, who outlast jobs and cities and versions of you. The ones who feel less like proximity and more like choice. Those are keepers.

But the five-year stranger theory isn’t really about loss.

It’s about realism.

And maybe a quiet invitation: be present with who’s in your life now, without gripping so tightly that you miss the point of them. Relationships don’t have to last forever to have mattered.

Some people are chapters.

A few are the whole book.

And most?

Most are somewhere in between. They are beautiful, fleeting, and exactly what you needed at the time.