How many Friends should I have?
This isn’t about how many true friends you can have, but rather about how you should distribute your attention across all your relationships.
There are people who know thousands of people but only have one or two real friends, and others who simply have their 10 friends. None is better than the other, but the effects of how many people you call friends compared to how many people you know is sure worth a discussion.
In todays world it’s presumable that you know hundreds of people, however no one has near as many friends. That’s logical since you only have so much time and attention. But let’s focus on the hundreds of people you know for now. Well, people you just know is probably not the interesting thing here, but rather how many people you can have somewhat better relationships with. In fact, there is a lot of science around it. Dunbar’s Number describes “the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar” — Robin Dunbar.
What I want to introduce with the first paragraph is a different approach to this number. I think that there is a specific amount of stuff you can remember about people, and that you can distribute it however you want. Dunbar’s Number is around 150 people by the way, but even if it were true — not saying that it isn’t — I could also create Bruckner’s Number, which for example says that you can know 250 people to a level where you don’t have to feel uncomfortable if you don’t start a conversation with smalltalk. (That’s not as general as Dunbar’s Number, as we all differ at that, but you might get what I mean?)
The Introduction of Total Social Memory
How much stuff we can remember is a limit, but how be distribute it isn’t. Let me explain my ugly graph a little further:
Person Green has a lot of relationships in the “you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them in a bar”-range, whereas Person Blue really knows a lot of people only by their names. The thing is, that the area beneath the lines, the Total Social Memory, is always the same. Depending on how your social life looks like, what job you have, what family you’re born into, and other factors, distributing it one way or any other might make more sense.
Overwhelmed by all those People?
I think that there are ways to push Dunbar’s Number. When we call it Social Memory we can definitely improve it, it’s just memory. One can expand her memory simply by writing things down. There’s a lot of value in that. Writing things down and repeatedly reading it is the number one way to remember things. You could just take a journal and write everything about your relationships down. That’s not hard, and you will engage with others on a new level if you do. You could also create Excel-Sheets to make sure that you really track everything. But there’s also a way that’s both organized and natural to use. It’s a software called Votre which lets you write a diary/journal. Votre automatically divides it up into the pieces you wrote about individuals. Give it a try here.
So how do you distribute your social memory? How many do you call your friend? Comment and clap if you like this model.
