Posted on:Feb 25 2021
My my my, do I ever miss the people I only sort of know!
I was catching up with my dear college friend, AK, recently and talking about all those mini social-connection hits we’ve lost over the past eleven-plus months. You know, with the barista you see almost every time you go for joe, or the friendly server at your favorite restaurant, or the bartender, or the other yogis at the studio, or the UPS driver...
People to whom you say, “Hey, how you doin’?” People with whom you’d exchange a smile. A co-worker you might chat with at the water cooler or in the communal kitchen.
Have you been missing a lot of people without fully realizing you were missing them?
You're not crazy - this is a slice of life pretty much everybody misses, and with good reason.
Not long after our phone call, AK came across an article that talked about this very thing we were lamenting: “The Pandemic Has Erased Entire Categories of Friendship,” by Amanda Mull, in The Atlantic. I’ll hit the gist of it here.
One thing this pandemic did, of necessity, was direct our focus and energy to maintaining our ties to family and closest friends. We decided who would be in our covid bubble and other relationships withered. And eleven-plus months ago, most of us probably weren’t really thinking about how this withering would play out, that pandemic-induced evaporation of entire categories of friendship would delete a "vital swath of joys that make up human life and buoy human health."
To be sure, the depth and intensity of these relationships varied greatly, but they were all, in some capacity, part of our personal warp and woof, and there’s been no substitute for them during the pandemic.
Zoom has certainly been useful for maintaining our closer relationships, facebook too, if you’re into that - but Zoom can’t recreate “the ease of social serendipity” or “replicate the activities that bound us together.” Granted, these aren’t people we’d Zoom with anyway, but they sure texturized our days, made them a lot more interesting, more human...
Turns out there’s a term for this slice of life, for the people on the periphery - “weak ties.” Back in 1973, a Stanford sociologist named Mark Granovetter coined the term. Weak ties are “acquaintances, people you see infrequently, near strangers with whom you share some familiarity.”
Weak ties are also people you’ve never directly met but you share something important in common - you go to the same concerts or sports events, live in the same neighborhood, and frequent the same local businesses. You wouldn’t necessarily call these folks friends, but they’re people you’re friendly with.
During the pandemic, these people on the periphery aren’t people we’ve “kept up with” - that wouldn’t really make sense. Along with international travel and indoor dining, they’re in a state of suspended animation...and even if you are starting to do some of your normal stuff again, the experience is so different because of the protocols that reduce interaction and masks that hide smiles. (Me? I'm for waiting for a more normal normal, ha, whatever that might be ?!)
The more I think about this peripheral life, the more I realize that we humans don’t thrive on close friendships alone, which is somewhat counter-intuitive - after all, close relationships have long been thought to be the be-all-end-all essential component of our social well-being. This pandemic spotlights that our casual friends and acquaintances can be as important to our well-being as family, romantic partners, and closest friends.
It must be said : Variety is the spice of life.
So, it makes sense that there’d be some pretty profound psychological effects of losing all but our closest ties. For going-on-twelve months. Our peripheral connections tether us to the world at large, and without them we sink into the compounding sameness of closed networks. Bubble Fatigue. If you’ve had a hamster-wheeling, pressure-cookering, puh-lease-pass-the-spice kind of feeling from so. much. sameness., you, my friend, are not alone.
Regular interaction just makes us feel part of the community, part of something bigger.
Take contactless delivery. There’s no chitchat, no social reciprocity. Drop the goods, ring the doorbell, dash. Transaction complete. What kind of tip or review does that inspire?
And Zoom calls are weird too - they feel rigid, they have a defined goal/agenda and expectations, you don’t get to add your “two cents” or interject some off-the-cuff levity. The humanizing texture has been stripped away.
And closed networks? I won’t get into it, but as you might imagine, bad things start sprouting in that kind of void.
This pandemic has made obvious the importance of friendship overall, and these weak and moderate strength friendships in particular. It’s tough to overstate : for our health and longevity, we need a variety of social ties and relationships.
I’ve also become way more aware of something else about these social ties - they prop us up, they incentivize us. To keep up with our hygiene, to care about holding ourselves together, to take our meds, etc. Without them, what’s-the-point? gets some traction and we can lose motivation to, say, comb our hair or swap out those same o’ same o’ sweatpants to which we subject our bubble people !
Fortunately, there’s cause for optimism: as more shots get in more arms, we’ll slowly return to more types of interactions, more hey-how-you-doin?s, more of the small joys of serendipitous chats...more of the stuff that meets our very human need and desire to be known and perceived, and to have our humanity reflected back on us.
We’ll be so happy to see our sort-of-know people again !!
This extended pause will hopefully give us a deeper understanding and appreciation of just how vital all types of relationships are to our well-being.
So many people contribute to our lives.
And as we add people back in, we’ll know what it’s like to be without them.
Please please please, pass that off-the-charts-hot Carolina Reaper pepper !
