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.
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: