What's Not to Like?

I’ve been on Facebook for a decade.  I’ve hated it for the entire time.

But the conundrum is, I’ve also loved it.  Without Facebook, I might never have known about friends’ fascinating accomplishments (Plays! Novels! Ironman triathlons!) and moves to other continents (all seven of them, although the Antarctica folks do also spend time in less penguin-y places).  I might have missed hundreds of thought-provoking conversations and hundreds more genuine laugh-out-loud snort-fests. I might never have reconnected with a couple of individuals so remarkable that they willingly tolerate my Scrabble habits.   I might have drifted irrevocably away from dozens of long-ago friends– and as a result, I might never have enjoyed some real-world paths-crossing fun at a coffee shop, a museum, a whale watch, a beach, or the ruins of Barnard Castle on a sunny summer day in Yorkshire, England.

I’ve long since reconciled myself to the fact that I’m probably not going to quit Facebook.  I thought I’d also decided not bother to try to parse all the things about it that bug the hell out of me.  But recently I realized that there might be some math involved.  Math!  That, of course, made the question irresistible.

Everyone seems to agree that a Facebook “friend” is not the same as a real friend.  But what does that distinction really mean, and why does it matter?  How many friends do we want or need?  What do we really want from our friends?  When does Facebook supply that, where does it fall short, and when does it actually undermine us?

Intrigued by these questions, I delved into the research literature. (Of course I did).   I read about two different set of numbers: one quantifying the number and closeness of friendships, and one quantifying the amount of time that friendships require to develop.  I found this fascinating.  Bear with me.

Dunbar’s number was proposed in the 1990s (by someone named Robin Dunbar, naturally) as the upper limit to the number of people a human can really know, and thus the upper limit on “real” friendships.  The number was derived based solely on the size of the human neocortex, as compared to that of other social monkeys and apes.  But the idea caught hold when it became apparent that many social groupings – Roman legions!  Hunter-gatherer bands! -- do fall remarkably close to this number. 

Dunbar later expanded his theory to suggest a series of layers or concentric circles.  Those 150 friends are part of a larger circle of 500 acquaintances, and beyond that an even larger circle of vague acquaintances.  Moving inward, 50 of the 150 are your core of good friends.  Of those, fifteen or so are really close friends, or “best friends”.  At the very center, five of the fifteen are the most important people in your life – often the family members you live with. 

These numbers aren’t exact, of course.  Some people flat-out don’t want this many connections. Friends drift in and out of the loose outer layers.  Researchers have quibbled over the sizes of the circles.  But a remarkable body of research upholds the general idea of their existence – as well as their importance, in terms of health and happiness, and the relative amount of time that people prefer to spend nurturing the bonds within each layer. According to Dunbar, most people assign about 40 percent of their available social-interaction time to their inner circle of five, 20 percent to the next ten people, and the remaining 40 percent to everyone else. 

How much time per person does this actually translate to? 

I did a few quick calculations.  (Of course I did.) The answer depends on what fraction of your waking hours you spend in the company of other humans in at least a semi-voluntary sort of way. (Work doesn’t count, but washing the dishes together does.)  If we assume a very rough estimate of about one third, and apply Dunbar’s percentages (assuming all layers are “full”), the per-person totals come out to three hours per person per week in the innermost layer, just under an hour per person for the next ten people, and six minutes per person for everyone else, assuming you don’t “waste” time on any mere acquaintances.

Of course, these numbers look a lot higher when you spend time with more than one person at once.  If those inner five are your family, you have 15 hours per week to spend with them en masse.  If you can fit ten friends in your living room, you and your gang could spend almost eight hours every week watching a trilogy or having a D&D marathon.  Still, there’s not a lot of time left for the 150 – or for making new friends.

This gets us to more recent research by someone named Jeff Hall.  Dr. Hall wanted to know just how much time people need to spend hanging out together in order to start thinking of each other as friends, close friends, or best friends.  He came up with numbers (numbers!) averaging out to 50 hours, 90 hours, and 200 hours, respectively.  Interestingly, Hall confirmed that the joint activity barely mattered, but that the time only “counted” if it was intentional.

Hall didn’t investigate romantic relationships or familial ones, and he didn’t directly equate his definitions of friendship levels to Dunbar’s layers. Nor did he quantify over how long a period this friend-making investment can occur -- but the friendship-formations he examined all took place within the space of six months or less, suggesting that the basic level “friends” were averaging at least two hours per week together, and the “best friends” more than eight hours per week – a high bar indeed. 

And that is where we get back to Facebook. Facebook is time-efficient – much more so than reading my wordy blog posts -- and that efficiency is immensely appealing, in the face of the daunting standards set by Hall’s numbers.  But for all its convenience and appeal, Facebook is really bad at Dunbar layers.

Oh, it tries.  That algorithm that controls how much you see from people?  Yeah, that makes sense.  If you “like” every single one of your mom’s posts, even if she’s just posting photos of the house plants, then you’ll continue to see them all – because she’s your MOM.  If you ignore that one friend who feels he has to announce every cup of coffee, then those posts will diminish from your feed.  Cool. 

But the algorithm isn’t imperfect.  It gets it wrong.  I think this is in part because there are too many variables at play: closeness, frequency of posting, frequency of response, total number of posts you want to see, and type of posts you want to see.  Some people use Facebook as a place to repost and link tons of impersonal stuff – politics, science, humor, sports.  I think of it more as a place to offer up my own happenings, or my obviously-oh-so-cogent-and-witty personal take on current events.  Some people care about my dogs/kids/hiking trips more than others do, and the friendship-math gets funky.

I have Facebook “friends” who definitely aren’t in my circle of 150.  I also have a “friend” who is the man I’m married to -- and friends in every layer in between.  Some of these people don’t post at all.  Some post a couple of times a year, some once a month, some eight times a day.  And about half the real-world people I care about, at every level, are not members of Facebook at all.  All this is utterly unrelated to how interested I am in the person, of course. 

Outer-circle intrusion from people who are, presumably, gearing their participation toward their nearest and dearest can be solved by unfollowing, if necessary.   Inner-circle exclusion can be dealt with by closing Facebook for one hot moment and texting, emailing, or standing on a mountaintop and waving semaphore flags.  Then there’s the problem of mid-circle exclusion: when a bunch of your friends post a group photo of the gang of them having a Really Great Time at the party you weren’t invited to.  I guess I can deal with this by reminding myself to be a big girl.  What took me longer to pinpoint as a source of emotional Facebook discomfort is a slightly more subtle problem: inner-circle alienation.  More about that in a moment.

Facebook, to me, is an absolutely fabulous way to maintain ties with your 150.  You care about these people.  You want to know what’s up with them.  You want to cheer for their victories, buy a copy of the book they wrote, cogitate about their political opinions, and laugh when their kid does something genuinely hilarious.  If disaster strikes one of them, you want to help out – even though you can’t really help them on the regular.  Recently, when I snapped one of my Achilles tendons and ended up on crutches for seven weeks, many friends with whom I usually only exchange a smile or a hello came through for me with acts of kindness, heartfelt words of support, and nifty second-hand orthopedic devices.  In short, these people are pretty awesome.  They’re important. They are real friends, but they are nonetheless friends of convenience, and that’s okay. 

Even the fifty, the “good friends”, are, ultimately, friends of convenience, too – and sometimes that hurts.  You WANT to make plans.  You even say so: “We should hang out!”  Then you don’t.  Because you’re a grownup, and you’re busy, and you need to call the plumber and the babysitter and the vet and who the hell knows what.  It’s just life – and math. 

But no matter how important the outer circles are, it’s the inner circles – the fifteen and the five – who really, really matter.  You don’t need that many of them, of course, but you do need SOME. These are the people who love you, in the active-verb heels-dug-in sense of the word.  These are the people who are, at least ideally, a permanent and relatively consistent part of your life.  They’re woven into your fabric.  They’re part of your identity.  They know you for who you really are, and (miraculously!) still like you. 

Mind-blowingly, it turns out that these people are also literally keeping you alive.  An extremely long-term studies of human lives (the Harvard Study of Adult Development) reached the startling conclusion that the single-most important determinant of whether someone is alive, healthy, and happy at age 80 has nothing to do with weight, exercise, or even cigarette smoking.  It is whether they say “yes” or “no” to the question of whether there is someone to whom they could pour out their woes at three o’clock in the morning.

Getting back to my point about inner-circle alienation, Facebook is useless with these close-to-the-heart folks – and sometimes downright painful.  It’s obvious why, if you think of hypothetical extremes: your parents are divorcing and your best friend is marrying your twin brother, and you find out… on Facebook.  Um, nope.

I realized that I gear my own Facebook posts toward the 50 and the 150, in terms of both content and frequency.  I tend to post once or twice a week, and I tend to focus on what feels particularly important, entertaining, and personal – but not TOO personal. 

I’m not trying to claim that I do Facebook “right”.  In fact, several people have strongly suggested that I do it wrong, in various ways.  I don’t often use it as a platform for my expertise in climate change science, and am therefore missing an opportunity to educate the world.  I don’t post enough that is thought-provokingly controversial; I’m too bland.  I’m too positive, which sets others up to feel like failures if their lives don’t feel that upbeat.  I’m too boastful, with my posts about achievements and accolades. All of these critiques hit home.  Blandness, political apathy, and boastfulness are… not my goals.  So maybe I need to adjust my posting.  But even if I do so, I’m still going to aim my posts toward the “middle” layers of friendship. 

Ultimately, I’ll accept that Facebook is, like so much in life, what you make of it.  Face to face interactions are always going to be the best, but I have friends scattered around the world.  Real conversations are always going to be more personal that shouting to the masses, but we all have limited time.  The math is real, and the numbers add up.

So… Facebook it is.  But know, my friends, that in my heart I’d rather being exploring the ruins of a castle with you.

The One Secret Trick...

Based on the ads that clutter the edges of my computer screen, I should be worried about a lot of things.  These include my wardrobe (“The latest in plus-size fashion!”), my finances (“Interest Rates Plummet!”), and my shoes (“Dozens of cute styles!”).  But there is one problem that the Internet Gods feel is even more appalling than my lack of trendy new pumps: the hideous signs of my decrepitude.

I should be stressing out about the dry skin on my feet, the wrinkles on my face, my maternal abdominal fat, and my general overall sagginess.  Scars are a biggie, too.  I should be trying to smooth them.  Erase them.  Photo-shop them.  Something.  Anything!  Indeed, I should be in a state of continual semi-panic about the visible effects of the Sands of Time. 

My proximal reaction is amusement at how poorly the digital universe seems to be tracking me. I’m not terribly prone to tinfoil-helmet-type fears; my thoughts are not valuable enough for anyone to want to steal them.  Still, it makes me snort and giggle to see just how wide of the mark these ads fly.   I’m pretty sure it doesn’t take an MBA to guess that a person who spends her time reading peer-reviewed journal articles, cracking obscure Star Trek jokes, and utilizing an online text-to-hexadecimal translator is probably not in the market for “The Revolutionary Secret That Dermatologists Hate!!!”

Come on, Google and Facebook, can’t you do any better than that? With all my keystrokes at your disposal, you still don’t know me one whit!

Or… do they? 

Oh, I don’t mean that I’m about to get liposuction and dermal abrasion, or start sighing abjectly in front of a mirror. (I can hear my friends snickering.)   Nonetheless, I do sometimes feel a disorienting disconnect with my sense of self.  Is that forty-two-year-old mom really… me? 

I clearly remember the summer day when I had recently reached the exalted age of ten, and my mother divulged that, deep down, she was still a ten-year-old, too.  The idea that my reliable, stolid mom-parent was simultaneously the pigtailed child grinning impishly from black-and-white post-WWII-Britain both comforted and terrified me.  Part of me wanted to cling to the childish idea that she – and all grownups – were omnipotent, omniscient beings who existed in a higher plane than my own.  But at the same time, I was already feeling the complex world of adulthood closing in on me like a pall of dense smoke.   I already knew that I didn’t ever want to lose my essential self. When it came time to navigate that daunting world, I wanted to still be me.  The me I knew. 

I am now the age that my mother was, on that particular day in 1982.

I don’t obsess over vanishing beauty; I never had it to lose, anyhow. At ten, I was not an adorable Shirley Temple; I was a grubby little nail-bitten creature often found somewhere high up in a tree.  At fourteen, I was not a peachy, blossoming young sylph; I was an uncomfortable collection of bony elbows, scraped knees, and miserable uncertainty.  At nineteen, I was not a gorgeously unblemished young lady with perfect curves; I was a doughy lump of acne skulking in a shapeless pair of overalls.  But through those horrifically awkward and sometimes terrifying years, I still believed that I could grow up to do world-changing things.  Cure cancer?  Visit Mars?  End war?  Discover new subatomic particles?  Heck, yes.  I adored logic puzzles, science fiction, running around in the woods, and asking way too many questions.  I liked inventing, and building.  I liked playing.  Playing!

And then Father Time wreaked a quarter-century of collateral damage. 

Facebook wants me to worry about the physical wear-and-tear and the visibly droopy bits, but what about the metaphorical scars and blemishes?  The wrinkling and graying of my perspective and personality?  The cumulative scarring of all of life’s failures and disappointments and disillusionments? Those seem far more difficult to treat with ointment, loofahs, supportive undergarments, or That One Secret Trick Your Doctor Won’t Tell You*. 

A few months back, a friend in his late thirties who is half-heartedly doggy-paddling around the dating pool expressed consternation about the fact that all the women he met had “emotional baggage.” 

My middle-aged cynicism kicked in instantly.  Baggage?  What, just like mine?  Just like yours?

Jay, who has been married to me for a full dozen years now, was about as unsympathetic as I was in the face of our friend’s complaint.  His thoughts on the matter, however, were radically different from mine.   While I inwardly harrumphed that all of us middle-aged farts carry a gray, wrinkly knapsack of past woes, Jay stoutly (and sweetly) maintained, “That’s silly.  Not all women have baggage.  Nancy doesn’t have any baggage at all.”  Yes.  He actually said that out loud.

Oh, Heavens to Betsy.  The assertion alone threw all the dirty laundry in my head into a fast spin cycle, churning up the staple set of humiliating and miserable memories that refuse to fade into obscurity.  I’m sure that hundreds of happy days have blurred together into a polyglot, but the most sparkling examples of my personal idiocy, embarrassment, and loss are as immovable and as obtrusive as pillars of polished marble. 

I should pause here to say that, given that I don’t have Baggage-with-a-capital-B, I have absolutely no ability (and no right whatsoever) to comment upon the agony of extraordinary emotional pain, loss, or paralysis, any more than I have the ability to imagine what it might be like to suffer physical paralysis. Nor do the Facebook ads that plague my screen offer cures for debilitating diseases, severe burns, or past abuse. They focus on the superficial effects of the passage of years: the everyday wear-and-tear and the inevitable scars, not the profound ones.  The ones we all acquire.  With time.

I worry that the impacts of all those small scars have cumulatively, yielded a crop of cynicism, inertia, and stolidness.  I peer in the metaphorical mirror, suspecting myself of giving up adventure for security and reneging on idealism and perfectionism in favor of Just Getting Shit Done.  Do I see just a hint of jadedness around my eyes?  Is my optimism sagging, thus allowing my sarcasm to flop around?  How did I get to be forty-two years old without ever paragliding, publishing a novel, or setting foot in Africa?  Why can’t I watch romantic movies without groaning and rolling my eyes, rather than sighing and tearing up?   At what point did the wrinkles of time inform me that my vote in the next Presidential election probably won’t matter, the Indigo Girls aren’t all that profound, and I’m never going to go to Mars?  My idealism is mottled with stretch-marks, dammit!

Stretch marks.  Yeah.  Okay, fine.  What about them?  The real, physical ones, that is.  Maybe there’s something I can learn from the physical that will inform the metaphysical.  So, okay, what of all the other physical changes and scars? 

I took stock of my scars.  And I found a few stories.

Left knee: don’t slide into first base if you are a second grader playing whiffle-ball in a parking lot. 

Right thigh: don’t go hiking up snowfields with an ice axe that you don’t know how to use. 

Left thigh: if invited by a family of Jamaican farmers to stop by any time before five o’clock, do not arrive five minutes late, after they have set loose their pack of trained German Shepherd guard dogs.  But if you do, pretending you came to play super-fun doggie games will fool five-and-a-half of the six. 

Lower abdomen: removing twelve pounds of tightly wedged twin by C-sections, by Jay’s report, involves a crowbar. 

Left breast: some lumps are benign.  Some days are full of gratitude. 

Arms: if you donate blood enough times – like maybe fifteen gallons or so by now – you’ll eventually have a collection of little needle-marks.  But they’re not junkie-marks, okay?  Okay? 

Face: for gods’ sake, stop picking at the acne!  Also, dusk in moose territory is a bad time to be driving relatively fast on a gravel road – but the doctor and two nurses in Meadow Lake Saskatchewan in the summer of ’99 were a kind, down-to-earth, and deeply generous team with a copious supply of heavy-duty black thread.

What does this all add up to, other than a complex roadmap of scar tissue (private tours -- by invitation only)?  Well, first of all, it shows that modern medicine is nothing to take for granted.  Second, it’s clear that I’ve gotten off pretty darned easily.  Third, it shows that scars tell a complicated story of good and bad luck, good and bad choices, and lessons fairly or unfairly learned.  But I think it offers a few broader hints, as well. 

One of those hints is – I kind of like my scars.  Mythologically speaking, those who try to turn back time do about as well as those who try to stop the tide or fly with wax wings.  But I don’t want to stop time, and more than I want to erase my scars.  My worries have less to do with my neck-veins, my unsightly calluses, and my too-too-solid thighs than with world-traveling still undone, world-saving still unaccomplished, and relative lack of parties at which everyone blasts the music immoderately high and starts taking clothes off – and these desires, I now realize, don’t have to be tied to anyone’s calendar but my own.

Yeah, I’m female, and yeah, I’m middle-aged.  As a result, the Advertising Gods think they have me pegged: “You Won’t Believe Our Miracle Scar-Erasing Crème!”

No, you’re right, I won’t believe. 

But there are things I do believe – and one of them is that I’ll happily ignore you, Facebook Advertiser.  I don’t want your snake-oil goo.  I don’t want your Dorian Gray outlook on life. I don’t want to erase my scars, expunge my past, return to high school, or reclaim all the fears, credulity, insecurities I’ve shed along the way. 

On the other hand, there are things I do want to hang onto.  My optimism is one of them. I want to believe that I can make a difference, that some songs are worth getting stuck in my head, and that sure, I will still travel the world one day with just a backpack on my back.  I want to stay up too late, and run around in the woods, and ask too many questions.  I want to eat s’mores with that once-me ten-year-old.

I’m pretty sure she’s here with me for good.  She’s a bit battered and scarred.  But… that’s okay.  She’s in for the long haul.

*Admittedly, my doctor does seem awfully youthful, but I’m pretty sure she’s not holding out on us.