There is something called Dunbar’s number which proposes that, on average, a person can only maintain 150 relationships at a time. This number was popularized, with a disproportionate sense of false precision, in Malcolm Gladwell’s 2000 bestseller “The Tipping Point.”
I listed my close relationships and got to 69, which I found to be a lot. My criteria was: at least 2 meaningful social interactions/year OR at least ten years of friendship (without recent social interactions). For instance high-school chums Aaron Pearlman and Greg Francis make the cut! Congrats, fellows. Four friends (and one mom) have passed away but I continue to invest in them so they are counted. Thanks, brother for another Challenge!
In your typical conversations and arguments revolving around "why this instead of this?" and the copout/rejoinder "why not both," these ideas about humans' natural limits to caring about things are often left out of the conversation in favor of specifics about the equal or relative importance of things.
My theory is that this idea, which many people intuitively understand - the idea that there's a limit to how many things you can pay attention to - got buried because people are in denial about how the internet just won't and can't live up to its "potential."
The infinite amount of things to learn and people to care about on the internet translates to a diluting. The internet's great but if you want to actually learn or care about anything in the long term, you paradoxically have to limit your time doing attention-span-shattering things on the internet. This means less money for an economy largely built on coercing people into spending more time on the internet than they might otherwise.
People don't want to confront this contradiction so they don't.
Thank you for this post, Dunbar’s number is such a good reminder of our natural limitations. Thank you for writing this.
I listed my close relationships and got to 69, which I found to be a lot. My criteria was: at least 2 meaningful social interactions/year OR at least ten years of friendship (without recent social interactions). For instance high-school chums Aaron Pearlman and Greg Francis make the cut! Congrats, fellows. Four friends (and one mom) have passed away but I continue to invest in them so they are counted. Thanks, brother for another Challenge!
I hope you know Nick Jenkins (Anthony Powell). New book compares the two: Patrick Alexander ‘A Dance to Lost Time’.
James Herriot and Armand Gamache.
In your typical conversations and arguments revolving around "why this instead of this?" and the copout/rejoinder "why not both," these ideas about humans' natural limits to caring about things are often left out of the conversation in favor of specifics about the equal or relative importance of things.
My theory is that this idea, which many people intuitively understand - the idea that there's a limit to how many things you can pay attention to - got buried because people are in denial about how the internet just won't and can't live up to its "potential."
The infinite amount of things to learn and people to care about on the internet translates to a diluting. The internet's great but if you want to actually learn or care about anything in the long term, you paradoxically have to limit your time doing attention-span-shattering things on the internet. This means less money for an economy largely built on coercing people into spending more time on the internet than they might otherwise.
People don't want to confront this contradiction so they don't.