Dunbar's Number Dilema
How many people can we keep up with?
In the 1990s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar came up with a limit to the number of people with whom we can “maintain stable social relationships”…
“By using the average human brain size and extrapolating from the results of primates, he proposed that humans can comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships.”
Well, in that case, I am afraid I may have overdone it slightly.
By the time I left University, I found myself with between 2,000-3,000 “friends” on Facebook, before subsequently deleting my account.
(I’m old enough to remember the days when to register for a Facebook account in the UK, you had to have an email address from Oxford, Cambridge or St Andrews University.)
On Instagram, I now limit myself to closer to the Dunbar number — and even that is a lot of avocado on toast pictures!
The modern media age is peculiar with the perception of coming across hundreds of strangers every, online and in real life. Be they academics, political leaders or influencers.
Yet we know who our true friends are — and they hopefully know who we are — so I am ultimately very grateful to have been blessed with such a full social life.
“A close neighbour is better than a distant friend” may have been true once, yet the ease of keeping in touch with loved ones around the world is one of the many blessings of modern life, as long as we don’t over do it.
Returning to the Dunbar number, I recall reading once that the average size of a hamlet in the UK for much of our history was around 140 people, a small enough number to be a close-knit community. Of course, privacy and independence are also virtues to be prized.
There are many things I valued about living in London for a decade — the galleries, museums, theatres and cosmopolitan communities, cultured and cuisines — but at times it was a little overwhelming for a small town so-called “spiffy Scot”, who grew up in a beautiful hometown with three streets and a population of under 20,000 people.
I am glad to have experienced the best of both worlds — a place where everyone knows your name growing up and also a city on a bigger scale. Sometimes it’s nice to be anonymous.
How many people do you realistically feel you can keep up with in your life?