In today’s Daily Mail is an article about the numbers of friends we, as humans, can actually handle at any given time. Turns out:
“People are only capable of maintaining FIVE close friends despite using social media.”
You can read the article here, but for simplicity’s sake, let me summarize it for you:
“In short, humans have an upper limit on the number of close friends they can have and for most of history that number has been right around 5. Yes, you read correctly, FIVE friends. Of course, through those five friends, we often have a wider social network, averaging around 130 “contacts” or what were once known as mere acquaintances.”
Six Degrees of Separation was an interesting concept and when you do the math, it turns out that that is probably a correct, if not a too-liberal, estimation. It is the theory that everyone and everything is six or fewer connections away, by way of introduction, from any other person in the world. A chain of “friend of a friend statements” can be established to connect any two people in the world through a maximum of six steps.
It was originally set out as a working hypothesis by Frigyes Karinthy in 1929. Karinthy did not have the means, in 1929, to test his work, but he showed how it might be done. Computers later showed that it was a testable hypothesis and went even further, suggesting that only three people (not including ourselves) connect us to the rest of the world. This would be the more conservative estimate and, at that, probably too low, if you ask me. The right answer lay somewhere in between.
Six or three, or five, it doesn’t really matter, for this little post is about what it takes to be a “friend.” As my regular readers will know, I recently quit Facebook and LinkedIn (the latter of which has done a remarkable job of depicting degrees of separation from contact to contact, pictorially on their site). My primary reason was (and is) how Facebook’s founders were accumulating wealth based solely on my presence. That is, the mere accumulation of subscribers to Facebook’s services was enticing advertisers who, in turn, pay a fee to Facebook to get in my face with any number of advertisements about things needed or not, wanted or not. I saw it has intrusive. Secondly, I disagreed with Zuckerberg’s politics and the ways in which he was spending his wealth on causes with which I have fundamental disagreements. Similar arguments were used in quitting LinkedIn, although in that case, I could see no continuing benefit to me in continuing to waste time surfing around the site.
Moving to a small town in Wyoming made it even less useful to me. Here, I can make my own contacts all of which will have far more value to me that linking to people known and unknown all over the world. In a small town, three connections are probably the right number, the right “chain” if you will. For example, I know Reed Scull, Associate Dean for the Outreach School at the University of Wyoming. How many steps from him to the governor? Well, he knows (quite well, it turns out) the leader of the Wyoming legislature, and he in turns, knows the governor quite well. How many steps from him to the President? I don’t want to know, frankly, as I am not a fan and do not want to be a friend of Obama. But the point in made: It doesn’t take that many links in the chain. And, in the end, my purpose now is to build chains that result in meaningful relationships, those which resemble friendships and not mere acquaintances.
Plato wrote about friendships. In his writings (such as they are), he discusses love (erôs) versus friendship (philia) primarily in two dialogues, the Lysis and the Symposium, though the Phaedrus also adds significantly to his views. In each work, Socrates is in two ways center stage; first, as a lover of wisdom (sophia) and discussion (logos), and, second, as an inverter or disturber of erotic norms. Plato’s views on love are a meditation on Socrates and the power his philosophical conversations have to mesmerize, obsess, and educate.
“Anyway, friendship, as understood here, is a distinctively personal relationship that is grounded in a concern on the part of each friend for the welfare of the other, for the other’s sake, and that involves some degree of intimacy. As such, friendship is undoubtedly central to our lives, in part because the special concern we have for our friends must have a place within a broader set of concerns, including moral concerns, and in part because our friends can help shape who we are as persons. Given this centrality, important questions arise concerning the justification of friendship and, in this context, whether it is permissible to “trade up” when someone new comes along, as well as concerning the possibility of reconciling the demands of friendship with the demands of morality in cases in which the two seem to conflict.”
This was drawn from Stanford’s philosophy page and is an excellent resource for anyone interested in the subject. Given their definition of friendship, it occurs to me that five is about the right amount that anyone can handle. After all, the “concern” we show requires a great degree of intimacy and knowledge of the other person, with such intimacy gained only through time and experience. And since time is a rather limited resource, it follows that (done properly) friendship will only develop around a select few individuals in our lives. Those individuals can and do change, whether it be through death or circumstance.
Circumstance – I have had in my life many good and true friends, but some of those friends are forever lost to circumstance. For example, a very close friend of mine in the 1970s and 1980s, was Mike Bogdanoff. He and I shared a kind of friendship that met most definitions of the term: it was born of a shared background, grew and was nurtured by our shared experiences in college, world travel as backpackers, and work at Lucky Supermarkets, and had at its base a shared respect for one another. I knew quite a lot about Mike and he about me, and the relationship was something that I came to rely upon in those years. Yet, circumstance got in the way. We moved in different directions in life, particularly as I entered the corporate world and he sought a medical education. I left Southern California and he stayed. We did have a disagreement at some point (the exact nature of which I cannot recall) and the ties that bound us together seemed to wither.
You might say, “well, then, it wasn’t a true friendship.” I cannot disagree but I surely want to, for in the moments of our time together, we certainly met all the criteria for a deep and abiding friendship.
My relationship with Dean Calvo has, in contrast, survived the vagaries of time, and I count him as my closest (bestest?) friend, if not a brother of sorts. But circumstance did not intervene. We carried our friendship through time simply because circumstance did not arise to thwart the effort. Through geographical moves, through marriages and children, we remained close. I suppose it could be said that circumstance itself was a friend of our friendship and served to bring us closer when it would otherwise have drawn us apart. That same circumstance caused my relationship with Mike to wither. Go figure.
Aristotle talks of three kinds of friendship: friendships of pleasure, of utility, and of virtue. Putting aside, for the moment, the distinctions between the three, it seems to me that pleasure, utility, and virtue are the reasons we make and keep friends to begin with.
“That is, I may love my friend because of the pleasure I get out of him, or because of the ways in which he is useful to me, or because I find him to have a virtuous character. Perhaps it is all three at once. And, given the involvement of love in each case, all three kinds of friendship seem to involve a concern for your friend for his sake and not for your own.”
How in the world can this be truly operative with any more than the five people researchers say we are capable of having as friends? I don’t know. I do know that I am truly incapable of it. As of today, I would count these people as true friends, if the definition is applied:
Cindy Brock (how can your wife ever NOT be your best friend?)
Dean Calvo
Grant Ashley
Tom Harrison
Rich McGuffin
Denise Hauenstein Piehn
Now, this is not to say that there aren’t others who run a very close second:
Jerry Kleeman
Kevin Stretton
Skip Hansen, of course.
John Daley
Amber Flippo
Debbie Baer
Steve Brown
Mike Chalmers
Rob Brandenburg
Allen Tang
Jerry Sternbach
These are people, among many others, who I know would give me the shirt of their back, as I would give mine, but time and circumstance have not aligned (yet?) to provide for the truly deep and abiding relationship that Socrates, Plato and Aristotle would have wanted for me. This is NOT to say that the relationships aren’t abiding or deep – all of them are, in differing ways – it is just to say that the degrees of intimacy are different and, for now, insufficient. I want of course to work on that.
But they are all friends in ways that “friends on Facebook” can and never will be.
This post was about how I agreed with the research in today’s Daily Mail. When I do a searching inventory, those six (and the next 11) rise quickly to the top. I cannot ignore this, even as it tends to confirm what the research says, but even if it didn’t, the number is still confirmatory in so many other ways.
What do you think?
