Tidying up the social cupboard for 2021
Anew year. Closing the door to last year’s dramas, opening up to new beginnings. Many cultures have traditions about starting afresh in the new calendar year, like the Japanese osouji, or ‘‘big cleaning’’, where every inch of the house is tidied up, including places that remain untouched throughout the year. And the Mexican tradition of sweeping your doorstep on New Year’s Eve to rid the house of negative spirits.
My own cupboards and doorstep remain unkempt. Instead of tidying up, I find myself reaching out to some of the people in my life… old friends, neglected family members, mates who started off as colleagues or neighbours who have morphed into good friends over the years.
And then there are the ones I will probably never talk to again. Sometimes, guilt tinges when I think about friends who have drifted away over time. Back then, we shared so much together, but our lives have changed now and new pathways have made our friendship less relevant. Am I being a bad friend if I no longer stay in touch?
The Greek philosopher Aristotle grouped friends into three types: friendships of utility, of pleasure, and of virtue.
Friends of utility tend to be work colleagues, or relationships that are mutually useful to both parties. The workmate you really like, your kid’s friend’s parents who you chat with at school dropoffs or play dates, the hairdresser you keep going back to, exchanging a surprising amount of personal information over the years.
These friendships, Aristotle argues, are very common but motivated by selfish needs, because getting along with these people is convenient for everyone and gives us all a sense of belonging to our community.
Then there are friendships of pleasure, which are usually based around a shared interest. Sports teams, book clubs, pub mates, or just that hilarious friend who brightens your day – these friends are important because we have fun with them, andwe develop better social and other skills.
But again, friends of pleasure are the result of our self-serving needs.
According to the sage wisdom of Aristotle, it’s the friendships of virtue that transcend our personal desires and aspire towards higher goals. Friends of virtue share a set of values of amoral nature and help each other to realise their better selves. Sustaining, constructively challenging, encouraging, and celebrating with each other are ways close friends bring out the best in each other. They are relationships that are harder to develop but tend to last longer than friendships of pleasure or utility.
Timeless advice. Thinking about my friends, past and present, in this way has helped ease the guilt of not always instigating communications with each of my old friends, since many of them were connected to some particular period of my life or a shared interest that has now come to an end.
The friends I should really be investing more time into are the ones where our friendship makes us both better people based on a common set of values.
Besides, it’s not just our jam-packed days that limit the amount of time we can invest into our friendships; our brains seem built to manage only a certain number of relationships too.
Dunbar’s Number is based on the work of British anthropologist Robin Dunbar, who studied correlations between the size of primates’ brains and social group size. Maintaining stable relationships with a large number of people takes neurological effort and information processing. Based on both brain imaging and anthropological data of human civilisations, he found that the neocortex can only handle a certain number of closer relationships – around 150.
Dunbar’s fascinating research breaks down our social groups even further. Human brains can manage about 50 social friends, people you see often but don’t call your close friends, and 15 closer friends, those who you would turn to for sympathy and you could confide in about most things.
Our most intimate support group, he says, tends to consist of only five people, which might include family members.
The members of our social groups can change throughout our lives, but the size of them generally stays the same. Studies on social media networks confirm Dunbar’s Number again and again.
Other research says that we lose about half of our close social group members every seven years, suggesting a natural life cycle to many of our friendships. As we move through the stages of life, changing homes, careers, partners, and interests, many of our friendships will change too.
Maybe it’s a kind of tidying up of my social cupboards for the year ahead. It’s nice to remember the people I’ve shared my past days with, but I also like to think about the friendships that I can strengthen or create in the year ahead.
Human brains can manage about 50 social friends, people you see often but don’t call your close friends, and 15 closer friends ...