curator of a wax museum

Sometimes I marvel at how many people live on the planet today. It’s around 6.7 billion. 6.7 billion people is a lot of people. People who eat, sleep, need shelter, need space, need hope, need love. The spectrum of humanity is staggering but I suppose the scope isn’t really all that broad. I’m sure there are tons of people that look like me; act like me; think just like me, too. I run into people who resemble people I know almost every day. Still, the sheer size of our human population brings me to pause. I feel like I meet loads of people all the time, but for consideration, Facebook alone has 500 million users; that’s more people than I’ll ever meet in my lifetime. It’s humbling to think that no matter how many people you encounter, even in passing, it’s just a fraction compared to the number who will have never known you beyond an abstraction. In fact, even if you achieved global celebrity, the number of people that you feel actually know you would probably decrease.

Recently, I’ve been thinking about human relationships, and how valuable each one is. Humans are, of course, gregarious and social animals (in varying degrees). Few people can achieve real self-seclusion because, I theorize, few people can become fully self-sufficient and fewer people would enjoy it anyway. We can live in a mutualist society not just because we can pool our skills, but because people have a need for companionship and understanding. I think everybody needs their lives to be understood on a personal level – not just as a sequential order of events. People need to explain their motives, offer their justifications, clean their consciences in ways for which only they see the need. For things like that, you need a real friend.

So with 6.7 billion people on the planet, a person has ample opportunities to forge real friendships. But again, we’ll never meet every other person on the planet, and the strongest relationships are the ones that age well anyway, so let’s reflect for a moment on how many people with whom we’ve already interacted. I start by limiting the population to acquaintances – people who could probably recall my face if provided my name and a familiar context. It’s probably not a very high number, and assuming a person can fit the criteria in one stage of life and fail to meet it in another, it fluctuates often. It usually includes childhood classmates, college buddies, colleagues, and smaller subcategories; all of which gain some longevity with social networking tools (which generally add little in terms of real intimacy anyway); all of which, without maintenance, inevitably fade with time. Sad but true.

Then I restrict the number further to people who know me personally, and need no prompt to recollect my face and previous interactions. People with whom I share close friendships or family ties, or with whom I interact on a near-daily basis. It can even include people who despise me, I guess, because hatred is still warmer than apathy. What I’m talking about is Dunbar’s number, which theorizes the number of people with whom a person can maintain stable social relationships. Of course, ‘stable relationship’ does not necessarily connote friendship, which I think is relatively hard to come by. The number of real friends a person has, I would imagine, would be considerably lower still.

Friendship is a precious and rare phenomenon that, for me, takes priority over most concerns. Sometimes it requires sacrifice, too, but it’s a worthwhile investment for what friendship fulfills. You see, I place a great deal of value on my friends and would go to great lengths to assist them if they needed it. The way I see it, since we meet so few people in our lives anyway, the ones who come by and really mean something, well you’ve got to hold them close. I generally don’t make enemies so there’s no need to hold anyone closer than my friends. A friend is somebody who will support you when you need it, and put you in check when you need that, too. A friend is somebody with whom you share freely because what’s theirs is yours, and yours theirs, but they might not give you a loan because more money might not solve your problems. Friends share themseles, maybe with some selectivity but without amendments or caveats, because friends are honest, and really there’s nothing to hide anyway, just things to be shown when the time is right (and sometimes it never is, and that’s fine).

Sometimes, people whom you consider your friends cease to be friends any longer. This is something that used to bother me greatly. However, I now accept that sometimes people change and so do circumstances. Sometimes people mutter foul things behind your back when they feel they’re being rejected or left behind. It used to take me by surprise, and I used to harbor ill will, but now I feel nothing but nostalgia and regret toward those people. I truly believe that real friendships can accomodate a change in stature. Friendships need not be fleeting. But to me, mobility is the essence of life, and them whose life is clutched so tightly to their chest so to keep it in idyllic stasis, appears to me as a statue. Some statues should stay in antiquity; as far as friendships are concerned, it shouldn’t be one person’s burden to keep them from crumbling.