Social Energy

I had a thought today that has been festering and I can't find a definitive answer to the question it raised.  I wondered by what age you could say you have met the majority of people you will ever meet in your life.  Some research into this concept proved inconclusive which is somewhat understandable since we tend not to keep a record of every person we meet.  I did reflect however on the people in my life right now and how old I was when I met them.  The easiest people to assign a date to are members of my family since they knew me from birth.  After them things got a little complicated because of the difficulty we have in pinning down dates, something which goes much further than this concept.

I have lived in 4 different houses with my family, 2 flats whilst at Uni, and Halls of Residence, and I have also been homeless although I never slept on the street I relied on other people for accommodation during that time.  These movements allow me to break up my lifespan into time periods associated with physical places, and subsequently associating the place we met allows me to give a rough time frame of when I would have met that person.  After some approximation and some counting I managed to come up with a few rough figures that represent the people I met - the huge caveat here is that these are just the people I remember and there will likely be many unaccounted for.  Nevertheless I broke the figures down by decade and the result was that up to the age of 10 years old I met around 59% of the people I have known, age 11 to 20 accounts for a further 18%, and age 20 to date aged 32 accounts for approximately 23% of the people I have met.

This did confirm something I suspected but not to the extent I was expecting, namely that I was expecting most connections you establish to be in your youth and that the older you got the lower that figure would become, which is somewhat true since 59% is definitely a majority, however the fact my third decade and a bit account for more than the second decade shows an increase in social connections.  That is surprising to me because I didn't realise how many people I have actually met within the last decade or so of my life, this is perhaps because the connections I have made in that time haven't been as deep and that in part can be explained by the fact that those connections came about through circumstance rather than lived experiences as was the case with those I met when I was much younger.

Still this idea fascinates me, there is the notion that we become less sociable with age and that we tend to disconnect more, valuing the relationships that have the most meaning and longest standing over those that are superficial but the more I pick apart and analyse the relationships I have formed with other people the more I realise there isn't a rule or a condition I can set that determines how or why those connections grow in depth.  As I said, my theory was that as a child since you live your life and grow up with people around you, the shared experience you would think would bind you and create something of unity but when I look at the people I met during that time, I am not in contact with most of them, with many of them being people I have not spoken to in over 20 years now.  The theory that shared experience binds you to other people it seems for me at least is hokum.

One thing I find interesting about social media and those in particular who live their life with visibility through it, is the fact that it can be very useful for establishing timelines.  The only social media site I use today is twitter but even with it, the profile I use is only a few years old as I delete and start over from time to time, it's a miracle that this one has lasted so long.  There are people I know who joined Facebook in 2006 and have never deleted anything from it, their desire was to keep everything intact.  Before I left Facebook I took a detox for a period where I did not use the site at all and what I realised was that friend count was superficial, the vast majority were people that weren't really "friends" and so I gave people the means to keep in touch if they wanted and left it at that.  Who I still speak to today are people that have reciprocated the effort to remain in one another's lives.  It is interesting to think however that for those who do live their lives on social media, Facebook for instance knows where and when you met people and how long you have known them for, and for a time when I did use the site it asked how you knew each person, you could see who was related to each other for instance. 

I come from a very large family, MyHeritage offers a free genealogy service that caps out at 250 people before you have to pay to expand your family tree, I met that cap only going back 2 generations on both sides of my family tree, there are still a lot more people that could be added in those generations alone before you even begin to factor in descendants and adding in marriages and non-blood relatives.  The point here is that there are a lot of people to maintain a connection with and an association, to a point where it would be exhausting and unrealistic for anyone to be expected to keep up.  Before the Internet I recall a time when my parents would visit relatives to catch up on everything that had happened, I came to know who the figureheads of the family were, people who knew everything about everyone and maintained connections with them all, the people who if you lost touch with someone you went to them to reconnect.

This brings me to a final concept, something I refer to as social energy, that is, the amount of energy you have to expend on maintaining social connections.  Despite the fact that I met 59% of people I know before I turned 10, I wasn't a particularly sociable child.  I knew people who were a lot more outgoing than I was, people who were much more active, and there was an impression I got as a child that this was important and that I needed to keep up and that failing to keep up meant I was doing something wrong or failing.  My teenage years when I became more reclusive were a time when I watched other people but only engaged in response and reaction never through a proactive pursuit of social interaction.  That experience left me with the reinforced idea that failing to be sociable meant you were failing as a person - which isn't true for what it's worth but that's the conclusion I drew.  The years at College and University when I came out of my shell and connected more really began to drain that energy I had reserved for social interaction and I quickly came to the realisation that other people make your life so complicated and that people are exhausting.  They don't have to do anything to be exhausting, the sum total of maintaining those relationships mounts up.

Going through this outward, then inward, then outward personality shift taught me that it was better to focus your energy on relationships that had a positive impact on your life and to reduce your exposure to toxic relationships and those that had a negative impact on your life.  That's the politically correct and adept way of wording it, the blunt force and crude alternative is to say you should devote energy to relationships that are of benefit and cut those that are of detriment but this creates an impression of a shallow mindset where you judge people based on what you can gain from them which isn't the intention but there is truth to that idea.  People do this, whether they want to make that admission on a conscious level or whether they are adverse to acknowledging that truth.  I frame it in this way only because I am conscious of how difficult it is to communicate nuance in text based communication.  Therein lies the problem with the idea of social energy as a whole, at its crudest it can be imagined as a cell phone with a battery that is forever winding down, at some point it will die if you don't stop using it for a while and let it recharge.  The trouble with that analogy is that at least when it comes to meaningful relationships, disconnecting from them for extended periods of time generally results in damage to those relationships, so how do you let that cell phone charge when you have to constantly use it?

How do you maintain social isolation without ending up alone?