The expression 'beach head' is an analogy for something like the Normandy landing, where the allies had to pull up one corner of the land mass Hitler had under his control, you really can't turn your back on anything unless you've won some battles and secured some ground that you can go back to as a sort of home base. That's sort of what I mean - try to build that both inside yourself and outside in ways where sure, you're not overreaching and taking from people unjustly but at the same time making sure that same kind of overreach is difficult for other people to do to you.
I don't know if you're familiar with Eric Weinstein but he talks about people essentially trying to gather some amount of 'F U' money, to the point where they can be themselves and express what's actually on their minds as they see it, ie. live in their integrity, without fear that doing so will mean that they (or worse they and their family) lose the roof over their heads and can't figure out where their next meal is coming from. That's a big problem with where we're at right now - people use these things to coerce each other, it's a big part of what doxing is about (both right and left wing stylings of it) - ie. threatening people's meal tickets for political and social conformity, and so much of having people believe absurd things is a tool for domination and flatting opposition for people to set up tribes who all ascribe to whoever those ideologies are. With some of that I've been cautiously optimistic about some of the Web 3 'smart contracts' and oracles of the sort that Sergey Nazarov et al are working on with Chainlink - that might actually help stop power from simply going to whoever has the stickiest fingers.
Pretty much if you want to live in a 'sane' space of your own creation you have to be able to keep the world at a distance and chose your friends well.
With what you asked about friends - I have a few close friends, mostly from late high school and early college, one or two from grade school, but the idea is that I try not to spend too much time around people who are unreliable and the people who I know who are at least partially reliable I try to understand where they're reliable, where they're not, and navigate that accordingly.
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The loneliest part of life: it's not just that no one is on your cloud, few can even see your cloud.