Developing meaningful friendships—having the kind of people in your life who were once known as “intimates”—takes time, but too many of us are locked in what social critic Barbara Ehrenreich has called “the cult of conspicuous busyness,” from which we seem to derive status and a certain perverse comfort even as it alienates us from one another. Throw in two careers and some kids, and something’s got to give. The poet Kenneth Koch, whose friends included the brilliant but childless John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, laid out the problem in verse: