Friendship is a zero sum game.
Been a while since I've posted here. It's closely related to something that I've recently given a lot of thought to - what I think of as social bandwidth.
All I mean by this is that we only have so much free time after we deal with sleep and work and general personal and home maintenance. This remaining time is then doled out to ourselves, our loved ones, our friends, and any hobbies we have.
That's what I call social bandwidth - that free time that we choose how spend. There's only so much of it, and you can only split it up so many ways before it starts to feel like you're stretched thin.
That is one of the reasons I spend so little time on Facebook these days. It's easy to burn vast quantities of time on Facebook, but for me it doesn't feel right - I feel better when I spend quality time with people around me. It's also the reason I've never liked video games and why I don't watch anywhere near the number of movies I used to when I was single - that's a hours long chunk of time where I'm ignoring the people that I live with or other activities that I prefer.
This explains why parties and gatherings are so important to our personal networks and the health of our friendships - when you're at a party with a dozen friends, you're maintaining that dozen relationships all at the same time (and so is everyone else), and that feels good. Plus, it's much easier than trying to schedule times to get together with each of those dozen people individually. A two-hour party for a dozen friends is pretty much equivalent to 132 hours of individual two-hours meetings for those same friends. That's pretty significant.
It's also why I'm skittish these days of forming new networks of friends. I do volunteer work, and it's rewarding and I enjoy the teaching aspects of it, but I have intentionally not gotten involved at a personal level with the other volunteers - in order to do so, I would have to reduce my commitment to something else in my life.
It turns out, friendship is a zero sum game.
All I mean by this is that we only have so much free time after we deal with sleep and work and general personal and home maintenance. This remaining time is then doled out to ourselves, our loved ones, our friends, and any hobbies we have.
That's what I call social bandwidth - that free time that we choose how spend. There's only so much of it, and you can only split it up so many ways before it starts to feel like you're stretched thin.
That is one of the reasons I spend so little time on Facebook these days. It's easy to burn vast quantities of time on Facebook, but for me it doesn't feel right - I feel better when I spend quality time with people around me. It's also the reason I've never liked video games and why I don't watch anywhere near the number of movies I used to when I was single - that's a hours long chunk of time where I'm ignoring the people that I live with or other activities that I prefer.
This explains why parties and gatherings are so important to our personal networks and the health of our friendships - when you're at a party with a dozen friends, you're maintaining that dozen relationships all at the same time (and so is everyone else), and that feels good. Plus, it's much easier than trying to schedule times to get together with each of those dozen people individually. A two-hour party for a dozen friends is pretty much equivalent to 132 hours of individual two-hours meetings for those same friends. That's pretty significant.
It's also why I'm skittish these days of forming new networks of friends. I do volunteer work, and it's rewarding and I enjoy the teaching aspects of it, but I have intentionally not gotten involved at a personal level with the other volunteers - in order to do so, I would have to reduce my commitment to something else in my life.
It turns out, friendship is a zero sum game.