Health
- People can generally maintain three to five close friendships.
- We need between 40 and 60 hours together for an acquaintance to become a casual friend.
- To move from casual friends to close friends, you need to spend an additional 140 to 160 hours together for a total of about 200 hours.
- However, deeper interactions can accelerate that timeline. You can form a close bond in less than 200 hours with meaningful conversations and a willingness to be vulnerable.
- Sharing things about yourself can lead to close friendships.
- It’s important to maintain close friendships, especially in person.
Make One Friend a Year
Emma Nadler writing in The Washington Post:
The landmark Harvard Study of Adult Development suggests that close relationships are the most significant factor in personal well-being — yet it is not the number of relationships, but the quality of the connection that matters. Gaining one closer friend in 2024 may significantly boost your life satisfaction, as friendship is known to protect against stress and improve mental health. And one friend a year is manageable, yet could lead to three friends in three years and a handful of friends in five.
Forgetting Doesn’t Mean President Biden Can’t Do the Job
Dr. Charan Ranganath, a professor of psychology and neuroscience and director of the Dynamic Memory Lab at the University of California, Davis, writing in The New York Times:
Mr. Biden is the same age as Harrison Ford, Paul McCartney and Martin Scorsese. He’s also a bit younger than Jane Fonda (86) and a lot younger than Berkshire Hathaway CEO Warren Buffett (93). All these individuals are considered to be at the top of their professions, and yet I would not be surprised if they are more forgetful and absent-minded than when they were younger. In other words, an individual’s age does not say anything definitive about their cognitive status or where it will head in the near future.
I can’t speak to the cognitive status of any of the presidential candidates, but I can say that, rather than focusing on candidates’ ages per se, we should consider whether they have the capabilities to do the job.
Respond or Remain Silent?
There are many hot button issues now. People are very divided. It’s worth thinking about what you will do when someone says something or writes something with which you strongly disagree.
Adam Newbold suggests it may be better not to respond:
When you respond, your noble intentions lead you to believe that you’ll counteract the noise with something nicer. But in the end, you’ll just wind up amplifying the noise. And you’ll never feel better afterward.
His post is about online communications but I think his suggestion applies equally to interpersonal communications.
Having said this, sometimes silence could be seen as acquiescence with something you just can’t agree with. Then some response may be needed. Even so, it’s worth considering if silence is the best approach, especially online. And if a response is warranted, does it need to be a nuclear attack?
See also, Manton Reece.
Jaron Lanier: Why to Delete Your Social Media Accounts
One of the main reasons to delete your social media accounts is that there isn’t a real choice to move to different social media accounts. Quitting entirely is the only option for change. If you don’t quit, you are not creating the space in which Silicon Valley can act to improve itself.
Lanier, Jaron. Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now (Kindle Locations 308–310). Henry Holt and Co.. Kindle Edition.
Lanier is a pioneer in virtual reality, a term he coined. He now works for Microsoft. Lanier knows from the inside how manipulative social media can be.
You can hear Lanier on this Microsoft podcast entitled “Jaron Lanier: Father of Virtual Reality, Renaissance man.”
The Person Best Suited to Us
Alain de Botton writing in The New York Times:
The person who is best suited to us is not the person who shares our every taste (he or she doesn’t exist), but the person who can negotiate differences in taste intelligently — the person who is good at disagreement. Rather than some notional idea of perfect complementarity, it is the capacity to tolerate differences with generosity that is the true marker of the “not overly wrong” person. Compatibility is an achievement of love; it must not be its precondition.
Nearly 1m Americans Are ‘Kinless’
Paula Span writing in The New York Times:
An estimated 6.6 percent of American adults aged 55 and older have no living spouse or biological children, according to a study published in 2017 in The Journals of Gerontology: Series B. (Researchers often use this definition of kinlessness because spouses and children are the relatives most apt to serve as family caregivers.)
About 1 percent fit a narrower definition — lacking a spouse or partner, children and biological siblings. The figure rises to 3 percent among women over 75.
Those aren’t high proportions, but they amount to a lot of kinless people: close to a million older Americans without a spouse or partner, children or siblings in 2019, including about 370,000 women over 75.
Making and Keeping Friends Takes Time and Effort
Clare Ansberry writes about making and keeping friends for The Wall Street Journal: