I’ve recently become aware that my friendship group is shrinking. And not by design. It’s that classic middle-aged, caught-between-two-poles dilemma that is to blame. Between caring for an elderly parent and a young adult (living at home, in keeping with the latest late-to-launch trend) and simultaneously working full time, I simply haven’t the headspace – or perhaps more accurately, the heartspace – to nurture the friendship group I once maintained with ease. Instead, I find that I make time for a small number of close friends in whose lives I feel both bound up and invested, putting quality before quantity. Yet nurturing even this reduced friendship circle takes more conscious effort than before. I have to remember to check in. To find space in my diary. To commit.
Amid the necessary fragmentation of our lives, I wonder if it’s become harder to hold to the centre.
Of course, there are larger webs of connection we all maintain beyond the tight circle of our close friends, generally numbering around 150 individuals – if we are to believe the findings of anthropologist Robin Dunbar. What has become known as ‘Dunbar’s number’ was originally based on studies of 38 primate genera. Dunbar found that group size among these primates was largely consistent, which got him wondering if this optimal group size might extend to humans. Wanting to test his hypothesis, he looked at hunter gatherer societies, neolithic farming villages, even anabaptist Hutterite communities, and to his surprise he found that the number of 150 stable relationships more or less held.
Dunbar’s work has been used by architects in building design, as well as by business developers and algorithm writers, and in spite of numerous scholarly attempts to debunk it, ‘Dunbar’s number’ persistently pops up: 150 is more or less the number that delimits telephone calling networks, Facebook groups, Christmas card lists, military fighting units, online gaming groups and church congregations.
The idea that underpins the thinking is neurological. Dunbar argued that ‘the social brain’ cannot cognitively cope with a greater number of meaningful connections. But what counts as meaningful? It’s a genuine and interesting tease.
When I think of my wider community of neighbours, professional colleagues, extended family and friends, 150 individuals feels about right. But these connections are not equally meaningful. Ranked by order of their depth charge, those friendships that go back decades have the profoundest impact: these are people I met at school or university or in my first adult forays into the working world. We have, as they say, history together.
Next come friendships forged in my local community. These are people I bump into almost daily, when I step out of my door, walk the dog, shop locally. Often, we’re in and out of each other’s houses; we keep sets of each other’s keys; my child babysits their children. We meet for drinks in summer and tidy the local square together on a Sunday. There’s a quotidian element to these connections, a threading of one life with the next.
Most people would probably place family inside an inner ring of intimacy, but mine sits further from the centre. We’re not just geographically far flung, which makes meaningful connection challenging, but there are chasms of difference between us in terms of faith, political leanings, and principled ideology; social distances which I’m not convinced genetic links can bridge. It is said that blood is thicker than water, but what gets lost here is the fact that water flows more easily and fluidly than blood. It finds a way.
Indeed, I sometimes feel that my connection to my work colleagues is more meaningful than my dealings with uncles, aunts, and cousins: it’s more intimate, collaborative, and confiding, as opposed to being habitual and ritualised. There is room for both in a life, to be sure, but I’m finding that growing older makes me crave intimacy and mutuality more. Especially the mutuality generated by a horizonal group of peers with whom you move through life in parallel, sharing experiences that feel generational, experiences that animate a cohort of people like a Mexican wave.
So, it bothers me how little I see of some of my oldest friends. And that friendships once easy to nurture have grown more complex, with mounting duties and entanglements on both sides. It’s become a truism to note that we work longer hours than previous generations did, and have less time for friendships as a result. But we are the poorer for it, I believe, and risk becoming cut off not just from our friends but from ourselves, too.
* * *
The stoic philosopher Hierocles talked about “circles of concern”. His interest was in cosmopolitanism and the idea that extending our oikeiosis – variously translated as ‘orientation’, ‘familiarisation’, ‘affinity’, and ‘affiliation’ – towards other human beings, in widening circles of connection, might form the basis of human ethical action.
Hierocles believed that the innermost circle of concern was the self (something we can easily lose sight of, leading to feelings of disembodiment and dissociation). He argued that connecting to the body makes you feel grounded. Successive circles in his schema move through family, fellow citizens, and countrymen, with the outmost circle embracing humanity as a whole. The cosmopolitan citizen is one who seeks to draw the further circles closer towards herself, so she might feel greater concern for more and more people. What Hierocles seems to have had in mind was a kind of utilitarianism for the soul.
It is utopian, of course, to think that we might feel solidarity and intimacy with distant others. But we might feel sympathy and empathy for them – a feeling for and with those populating the outer circles of concern. It is not so different from what Freud described as “oceanic feeling”, except for Hierocles, evincing the proper level of concern for each ‘community’, near or far, was a way to practise the virtue of justice. Hierocles still feels relevant to me when I think of the plight of migrants, and the differences between those who want to welcome them and support their right to live better lives, and those wanting to pull up the drawbridge.
Just as I worry that my social circle is shrinking, I worry that as a society we no longer have the heartspace to entertain Hierocles’s outer circles of concern. We suffer from compassion fatigue when it comes to the plight of distant others. The constant bombardment of images of suffering blunts our ability to respond. And we suffer from overwhelm, from there being so many claims on our empathy and charity that we end up feeling numb. We struggle to have meaningful connections with these distant others, because our ‘social brains’ cannot make that cognitive leap. But perhaps this is where we need Hiercoles all the more. We need to remember that sometimes justice should take precedence over the more intimate concerns of friendship.
