Saying No to Friends — Why I’d Rather Be Alone? | by Viv Pranjal | Activated Thinker | Sep, 2025

The sacrifices we go through in our journey. It’s something that naturally needs to happen.

Whether it’s getting rid of a bad habit and replacing it with a good one you can do all the good stuff, but if your foundation has not changed and improved by replacing those bad habits with good ones, and getting rid of those bad habits, then it doesn’t stick.

Kind of lost my train of thought, but with making sacrifices it’s natural in improving oneself.

We want to sit around and watch TV all day instead of going to the gym. And when we go to the gym, we know it’s gonna suck, but you gotta put your shoes on and start heading out that way.

That’s the thing with my journey. When I first came along, I wanted to play video games, I wanted to eat junk food. My sacrifices were:

• I had to stop playing video games.
• I had to stop hanging around bad friends.
• I had to stop indulging in instant gratification to better myself.

It’s been a year and some change, and I’ve made great progress through great sacrifices.

Sacrifices can also mean changing your friends. We all have friends we love to hang out with, but me and you are different we want to improve.

Maybe we do sometimes, but we know it’s not good for us. So when you hang around with those friends, what are you accomplishing? Sure, you can still be in touch and talk once in a while why not?

But multiple times I’ve had friends come up wanting to hang out, and I just gotta turn them down because I know I’ll end up doing the bad habits I’m trying to stop.

Recently, I realized how the average high schooler eats. Just junk food Jack in the Box, McDonald’s. And you start to realize, that’s just how they eat.

But you kind of are what you eat, in a sense. A healthy person eats healthy. An unhealthy person eats unhealthy.

Even though I always ate decent food and never thought much of it, after research, I realized that junk food is really bad for you. And even if you have a fast metabolism like me, you still have to cut that stuff out.

It’s not about being comfortable all the time. When I think back to my younger days, my teenage years, I’d just sit around on my phone watching YouTube all day long.

Now, sure, maybe I’ll fall into that sometimes, but I’ll get off my ass and go do hard work. At the end of the day, you can kick up your feet knowing you earned it.

That’s the thing: you gotta do the hard work, especially when you don’t feel like it.

One tip I’d give is realize what you want to achieve. Realize what’s good for you and what’s bad for you.

Then slowly cut out the bad. Maybe it’s a friend, maybe it’s an indulgence you thought was harmless but is actually bad for you.

For me, TV was a vice. I’d maybe watch a few episodes on HBO. But now, I turn that off and I watch a podcast or two. I learn, I gain.