How many friends can one person have?
Continuing along the theme of reach versus depth, we recently came across this fascinating question and the answer seems to be much lower than you would expect.
Care to venture a guess – how many friends do you have?
According to stats found on Google, the average person has 654 contacts in their phonebook, the average Facebook user has 338 friends and 150 followers on Instagram. Somewhere between 380 to 420 friends seems to be manageable, right? Sure, depending on your personality extroverts might have slightly more and introverts slightly less, but at least 350 seems to be a good guideline if you look at these stats.
Robert Dunbar, a British Anthropologist and Psychologist, has been doing research in this domain for close to 30 years and his results show something vastly different. According to Dunbar your mental bandwidth allows you to meaningfully connect with only about 150 people from time to time or at least once a year. That’s a lot lower than you would initially guess or expect.
Dunbar breaks it down into three different levels that are very insightful. These are as follows:
At the centre you will find three to five true friendships – intimate relationships with people whom you have the habit of connecting with at least once a week. You know the details of their lives and can share yours with them.
The next circle is made up of people Dunbar refers to as “sympathy” friends. You connect with them at least once a month and they share your values, interests, and perspectives on life. This is interestingly the size of an average sports team, which is something cool to note. The 20 people in these first two circles is about all the people most humans can manage to truly know.
Your “tribe” consists of approximately 120 to 150 people in total. You know their names, what they do, their kid’s names and some other superficial info bits about their lives. On average you would interact with this wider tribe around once a year to maintain connection, but not necessarily more than that. Apparently, in medieval times this was the size of the average town, and this number still seems to play out in modern times.
So, what’s the point?
One point is that there exists a tension between our design and desires: we seem to be wired with the ability to maintain around 150 relationships of varying levels of connection, while simultaneously having the desire to connect to vastly more people given the reach that modern technology allows us.
A common result seems to be that we spend a disproportionate amount of time, energy and effort on people that fall outside our inner circles, at the expense of our most meaningful and rewarding relationships. Simply because we can. We get sucked into this notion that more is more. But, like we shared last week, reach does not equal depth.
So, what now?
Take this exercise: write down the names of the people that would fit into the first two circles. Don’t worry if you have less than the “average” 20 names. In this case less is more. Also don’t worry too much of you have slightly more. The goal is to identify who fits where and then making sure that you devote the biggest percentage of your social time to the people closest to the centre. Here’s a tip: just because Francois van Coke or Siya Kolisi is your Facebook friend, does not mean you should be concerned with what they had for dinner on Tuesday or the names of their kids.
Invest your time, effort and energy into those people at the core of your circle. The result is a meaningful life, shared with people that are willing to do the same for you.
As always, thank you for reading and ending your week on a high.
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