150. … we gather on the edges…
(morning thinking)
A man I would chat to most mornings, a school run pal, has died.
We’d walk, after seeing the boys through the school gates, back along the prom to our respective homes. At the point where our paths would diverge we’d stop walking to finish exploring whichever idea we’d been poking into. He was an old fashioned socialist, worked in unions. His son, in my son’s year at school, was the younger of two boys so he had that older dad wisdom. I enjoyed our conversations and had missed his occasional company when, as the boys progressed to the senior end of the school, I was retired from the school run.
It's sad when we lose people. A woman and two young boys who’ll redefine their lives missing a vital, integral part.
He wasn’t a close friend. We were probably not more than acquaintances but I liked and respected him.
We were on the periphery of each other’s lives.
I reconnected with an old friend earlier in the year, visiting him in his hospice as he took a kicking from a particularly virulent cancer. He and I had been in each other’s lives sporadically. Firm friends when briefly together then absent for years before reuniting unexpectedly. That pattern four times over two decades.
Watching his close friends arrive for visits, the barely concealed weight of their sadness. I also felt sad but the happiness I felt at having reconnected with my old friend tempered the impending loss. He was so strong despite carrying such huge pain. I'd always found him inspiring but his stoic courage was something else. Profound.
The people close to him would lose more and feel more than me. I was a peripheral friend.
Both of these peripheral friendships, on the edge of my social groups, were nourishing. Both men informed my idea of the world, my sense of self. I think both men enjoyed my company. Despite the lightness of our relationships they were meaningful and reciprocal.
What happens on the periphery is important.
I’ve been thinking a lot about periphery. Peripheral. Is “integral” its opposite? Round the outside contrasted with held together in the centre. Ah, central, central will be the opposite of peripheral.
We can’t all be central. We can’t be main characters in every play. There are 8 billion interwoven stories spooling out across the world.
I wonder if we are all more peripheral than we would have been in the past. In times when our societies were smaller, tighter, thicker. A density of emotional connection created by holding souls more closely together.
In the distant past we might have lived in communities of 150 people. We’d know 20 or 30 people intimately. They’d be our family and friends, people we’d share food and laughter and concerns with. We’d know another twenty or thirty people as acquaintances, the folks we’d stop and chat to as we passed on our way from water hole to berry bush, here to there, but not necessarily invite over to share a stew or explore the knots and tails of a tricky dilemma.
That would leave about one hundred people on the periphery. Two thirds of our little society. People we might be on nodding terms with or whom we might recognise but not know.
A thick social broth.
I wonder what the ratio of liquid to oats is in a good stout porridge. BBC Good Food says to “put 50g porridge oats in a saucepan, pour in 350ml milk or water”. So that’s about 1:2 or 1:3 right? Something like the relationship ratios in the oldie time village.
Today our social porridge is a little more complicated. We have a core nucleus of friends and family and maybe the number’s similar, twenty to thirty people, although data seems to suggest a trend toward a diminishing number of close social connections. Do we have less friends?
Social media increases the number of peripheral friends we gather on the very edges of our consciousness, pushes those boundaries further out. Adds too much liquid to our porridge. Puts the runny porridge in too big of a bowl. We skew our metrics, distort the ratio. Survey data seems to suggest the average facebook user adds a couple of hundred extra people to their ‘community’. These additional relationships are maintained by a single click of recognition. A Like.
There are countless other parasocial relationships; we are “imaginary friends” with many hundreds of celebrities through social feeds, television programmes, podcasts and the like. We extend emotional energy out to personas in the world who are completely unaware of our existence. We give time and capacity to relationships with no reciprocity. We get nothing back.
In olden times, when we might have lived in little villages, we’d have known our friends and then some acquaintances and then a bunch of familiar faces. Beyond that we might have an idea of who the local king was and perhaps a few folks from nearby settlements. Trading pals maybe. We might have a personal relationship with a god or two or ten.
A soup with a good ratio of veg to water is flavoursome and nourishing. The lumps of veg are all touching. Nothing floats off on its own. Thin and watery soup is a disappointment and it wont sustain us. We don’t get much energy from a watery soup.
One dimensional societies, spread thin, replace the thick, warm broth of tight community. Our peripheries expand, lose meaning, become superficial.
Those peripheral relationships give us valuable feedback on who we are without the bias of love.
In his book Selfless Brian Lowery draws attention to the sheer number of interactions we experience with other people before we leave the house in the morning. If we share a home with flatmates, friends or family we might jostle for bathroom position or gather for breakfast. Whether or not we share our home there's a good chance we interact with news stories or music created and mediated by other people. We might check our socials feeds, emails and texts. All of these myriad potential encounters shape who we are by providing other humans against which we measure or make our sense of Self.
Do we water down our society by adding in too many runny, insubstantial, one-sided, relationships? Do we water down our selves? Stretch ourselves too thin?
Community and society, gemeinschaft and gesellschaft. Measured by the distance from our heart.
I think I failed to understand much of Erving Goffman's book "The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life" but I the gist is probably in his exploration of the drama of social interactions; the way individuals engage in social situations as if they were actors on a stage. Goffman noticed that we carefully manage our impressions and present different "fronts" to different audiences. We’re different at work and at home.
Through examining the various techniques we use to shape the way others perceive us Goffman came to the conclusion that our social reality is constructed as these interactions bounce back and forward between people.
I don’t know, I struggled with the book and didn’t get to the end.
The travel of the personas we project out into the world seems increasingly one way. When we beam our interactions into an Insta-tok-book void are we weakening the fabric of our own social reality?
Do we get less good at being human?
Kevin Kelly thinks we should cultivate twelve people who like us, because they are worth more than 12 million people who like us.
Friendship, connection and our sense of who we are is probably not a numbers game.
I tie myself in knots thinking about things I don’t really have the apparatus to make solid sense of. I have a small coffee budget, if you’d like to meet up and improve the quality of my questions give me a shout.
Online conversations are a good second best please comment below or share and loop in your knowledgeable friends.
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Thanks for reading. I love that you do.
Paul.
Cf. The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell “150 is the limit”
Technological change is not only diminishing social relations. For some, especially those drawn to be a little different from their neighbours, the close historic community was stifling , the porridge too thick. Technology provides the opportunity for other communities beyond the physical constraints of locality. Finding your tribe online can help some people.