Relational Churn
Measures Of Social Complexity
I wonder if relational churn is greater today than at any other point in recorded history.
By ‘relational churn’, I mean, the sum of our rates of meeting — however minimally — new people (or previously known people) and our rates of losing contact with people — however minimally we knew them.
Individual relational churn is a measure of how much change there is in the relationships of one person. If I am gaining and/or losing a lot of relationships then I have high relational churn. If my relationships are stable, that is, I am not gaining or losing them significantly, then I have low or zero relational churn.
Group relational churn is a measure of how much change there is in the relationships of members of a group, and is simply the sum of the relational churns of the individuals in the group. (Intra-group relational churn is a slight variation where only relationships between members of the group, and not relationships between group members and those outside the group, are counted in the meeting/losing-contact rates.)
Specific and Inter-specific Relational Churn
So far, I have introduced ‘basic relational churn’, ie, the churn in relationships of absolutely any kind whatsoever. It also makes sense to consider specific churn within particular kinds of relationships (working, friendships, intimate, transactional, passers-by etc.), and also to consider inter-specific churn between particular kinds of relationships (ie, when relationships morph between or spread across working, friendly, intimate etc.)
Over a lifetime, an individual’s basic relational churn is simply the number of people they ever met (optionally counting some people multiply to account for periods out of touch), doubled (to account for meeting, and then losing contact with them), divided by the length of their life.
During a lifetime, relational churn of all kinds (basic, specific and inter-specific) will vary, sometimes being low, and sometimes being higher, either due to gaining new relationships, losing them, or gaining and losing them roughly simultaneously.
Relational Churn, Adaptation and Stress
As evolving creatures, we are in a constant process of adapting ourselves to our situation(s). As evolving human beings, we, to a degree not found elsewhere in the animal kingdom, are also in a constant (and often massively destabilising) process of adapting our (changing) situation(s) (environment) to our (changing) selves too.
Relational churn is one type of change in situation (the situation of our relationships), and so relational churn is associated with our attempts to adapt ourselves and our situations.
We adapt in response to stress (caused/triggered by situations for which we are not already adapted). When our adaptation process is improving how adapted we are, we are under healthy, evolutionary and transitional stress; when our adaptation process is not resulting in improvements to our adaptation, and the stressful situation persists, we experience unhealthy, chronic stress.
So, relational churn, representing some degree of change in (relational) situation, is associated with stress (either as a cause of stress, an intended remedy for stress, or elements of both), which could be considered to be evolutionary and/or distressing, transitional and/or stale, healthy and/or unhealthy. The greater the churn for an individual, the greater the adaptive load (stress) on the individual.
Historically Unprecedentedly High Relational Churn
I suspect that relational churn in the human population as a whole (ie, the rate of meetings and loss of contacts between any members of the human race) is greater today than at any other point in recorded history because the human population as a whole is:
- greater in number
- more able to travel greater distances, more quickly and more frequently
- more in communication, mostly via the internet
- less preoccupied with agricultural subsistence (burgeoning middle classes, declining poverty, urbanisation, access to technology etc.), and therefore more likely to be engaged in more of the increasingly many other human activities which are increasingly relational
- in closer proximity (mostly due to urbanisation)
…than ever before. There are basically more people than ever before running into each other physically and virtually at ever high rates than ever before. This represents a historically unprecedented rate of adaptation, evolution and stress, of both healthy and unhealthy varieties.
Ecological Relational Churn
Maybe the increase in social complexity within the human species has made us, as a species, incredibly self-absorbed, resulting in a tragically undermining loss of relationship with the non-human environment. For many of us, there is little churn here, because our individual relationship with nature has often always been minimal, and what we need is churn representing new environmental relationships.
Perhaps our tendency to simplify our non-human environment (through monoculture, and other forms of environmental standardisation/degradation) indicates that we are focusing our limited ability to deal with relational complexity to narrow segments of human activity, and draining the relational complexity out of other areas (the natural environment) which serves increasingly utilitarian purposes, rather than existing in its own glorious (if industrially inconvenient) multiplicity of relation, for its own sake.
The current (anthropogenic) mass extinction can be interpreted as a massive ecological relational churn: a massive reduction in relations of all types, between crashing populations in crashing ecosystems.
Managing Personal Relational Churn
If we are living in times of unprecedentedly high relational churn, then that opens up the likelihood that we will find ourselves managing a much wider range of churn situations than our upbringing, culture, social programming etc. has prepared us for. Our assumptions about how to manage relationships might be well suited to a particular set of churn situations that occurred in our recent ancestral/cultural past, but may not be well suited to what’s happening now or is set to come.
Noticing mismatches between our relational assumptions/judgements, and our churn situation might shed light on relational patterns that are puzzling to us.
Here are some assorted observations/speculations/ponderings:
- people often report finding the countryside friendlier than cities. Perhaps one reason for this is that people often greet each other more in the countryside. A greeting creates a slight relational load, but in the countryside there are often few enough people that the benefits easily outweigh the effort. Saying hi to everyone you pass in a city would be exhausting and impractical, so we learn to ignore each other in this way in the city. An example of conserving relational churn.
- many/most people have or claim an unrealistically optimistic sense of their ability to maintain friendships/relations beyond circumstantial convenience. Perhaps this is because each of us has a relational limit (based on number of relations, and effort required to maintain relations, among other things), so although in theory we might like to and intend to, it’s infeasible to just keep on adding indefinitely to our set of relationships.
- I wonder if there is a general cultural judgement that starting relationships is good, and ending/losing them is bad (or a sign of unkindness, or, undesirability). This likely has the effect of encouraging meetings, but leaving endings to chance and fear. If we have a relational limit, and a tendency to load on new relations, this suggests to me that we will also be losing relations of equivalent effort at a similar rate, and might not be paying much attention to which of our relationships are fading away and ending (because endings are ‘bad’, so we’ll end up ignoring them…) — alternatively, if we are losing relationships we value, we may not have a good outlet for grieving, or perhaps negotiating, because endings are taboo and an admission of weakness. In general, ‘organic wastage’ might be a reasonably good approximation to a good result, but not always. (In general I think that the tendency of this globalised civilisation to pay attention to beginnings and growth and not to decline and endings, to additive processes and not subtractive ones, leads to all sorts of undesirable imbalances.)
- a desire to maintain as many relationships as possible, because ‘endings are bad’ and ‘maintaining relationships has overriding value for its own sake’, is generally bad for the relational situation. Living beyond our relational limit is stressful (granted, in some circumstances, stressful in a way that spurs us to adapt beneficially to a greater limit), liable to reduce the quality of our relationships and to cause relationships to drop out in an uncontrolled way, rather than in a consciously chosen/desirable way. If I’m trying to keep up too many relationships (eg out of fear of not having enough), and not consciously and compassionately jettisoning the ones that are least relevant, then I run the very real risk of maintaining the closest, easiest relationships (which might not be very genuinely relevant to me), and losing other potentially relevant relationships that are for whatever reasons less visible or able to claim attention (eg distance relationships, requiring non-routine timing, effort or travel etc.). When I attempt to maintain too many relationships, and claim no control over beginnings or endings, I abdicate responsibility for my relational situation to circumstance, am highly vulnerable to distraction, and am effectively surrendering conscious care over my life to other forces that likely don’t have my best interests at heart, even if they intend or claim to. I’m not advocating being a control freak, but it is good to be aware of the forces at work in one’s life, and to choose them to the extent possible and reasonable…
- scarcity economies can easily create inequalities, as people try to take as much of the scarce resource as they can. When this applies to relations, some people end up overloaded with too many relations, some people end up with too few. Everybody looks towards the haves, and forgets about the have-nots. As with any scarcity economy, those at extremes experience the greatest distress, and the least ability to sort themselves out.
- our relations with possessions/objects/activities etc. also take up our relational capacity, especially as objects in this technological age are ever more common, varied and exhibiting of a great behavioural range, and activities explode in variety and depth. How do we want to split our relational capacity between living things and non-living things and activities?
- operating with a relational deficit all the time makes us less open to the present moment. If I’m relationally overloaded, it’s harder to have compassion for the homeless person I pass in the street, harder to relate with the cashier and public servant as a human being rather than a robot (or servant/slave!!), harder to have the time to assist those who come across the way who could benefit, and harder, crucially, to relate authentically with those dearest and most relevant to me.
As Kahlil Gibran said:
And he who has deserved to drink from the ocean of life deserves to fill his cup from your little stream.
…and when (s)he has, let them free to go on their merry way, without weighing you or them down forever more… (my addition)
As with delving into any previously/largely automatic/subconscious processes, being aware can lead to as many complications as being unaware… but my feeling is that complications of awareness are, when we’re ready for them, more desirable than complications of unawareness…
My purpose in writing this is to acknowledge this, my, our tumultuous world of relational churn, to embrace it, to choose it, and to move in it with increasing consciousness and care. To fully claim responsibility for and agency in my relationships with people, animals, plants and environment.
Likely related reading (I haven’t read this yet, but I’ve just ordered it): Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds by Zygmunt Bauman.
