On Overloaded Relationships
A thing I’ve been realizing more and more lately is the second order effects of limiting the social circle too much. It seems that when we have certain interests and desires that no one around us shares, we become limited in our outlets about them, but also in our ability to explore them. Take for instance a person playing an instrument, having an interest in statistics (like EVT), mental models, systems thinking improvement, general self improvement, the physics of optimal weight lifting, the desire to improve one’s personal time while running, or generally interest in relating current issues with how those have been dealt with throughout history.
If that person’s social circle has converged to that of most modern men, being about 3 friends and a partner, give and take a few, it is necessarily insufficient for those people to carry all of those interests. He starts projecting more functions on each person than are structurally warranted.
That projection of multiple functions on any one person, whose existence in his life is unrelated to any of those interests he has, creates problems that are altogether impossible to trace all the consequences of. These are the second order effects. The main problem becomes that the few persons he does have around him will start carrying the weight of a variety of interests. The relationships become overloaded.
This problem seems like a pretty banal issue, but the fact that truly everyone I know seems to be in a similar situation, and the opportunities for organically meeting people around shared interests seem to have diminished (at least within my own sphere of existence) to such an extent that meeting people in real life has become the exception rather than the rule, causes these indirect issues to become visible everywhere you look. Someone at the lunch table at work says something so incredibly personal about his less than satisfactory romantic life, or a person at a local running club tries to pick up every woman he sees, and you think “why choose to do it like that?”. And I’m all for connecting with people at random functions, but the setting I observe these events in is never truly appropriate or smooth enough to expect any sort of pleasant outcomes from them. To really converse with someone about personal desires or problems, you ideally have long form conversations where silence provides an equal playing field or thought field.
Now the overloading of relationships and the degradation of social fabric are seemingly unrelated but overlap quite a lot. Take the latter as a problem to disentangle. A pattern that seems to arise quite often is the following:
- A person has few social relations. Most of them being some kind of legacy friendships where he’s had them since high school or college, without there being much that links the persons in their current lives or having much common interests to engage them.
- The person keeps living his life, having a job and watching TV/Youtube in his spare time. And perhaps has developed an avid interest in a certain video game or general lifestyle influencers. None of these things bring extreme amounts of excitement into his life, but they provide enough dopamine to fill the gaps between the structural occupations such as eating, seeing family and work.
- As life progresses and the person sees life almost passing them by, and loneliness building, they start looking for people to spend time with. A romantic partner is the best candidate for filling as much holes in his life as can be. And so he starts looking for a partner. Problem is, it’s not that easy to meet new people when the few people you hang out with are people having nothing in common with you other than shared experiences a long time ago.
- The person will join a sports club or gym, perhaps the local running club, and actively seeks people in those places that can fill those holes (i.e., romantic, entertainment and physical exercise). Effectively joining those places for the wrong reasons and degrading the social fabric of them. It’s degrading the social fabric because the object of that club is altogether not related to those holes. Don’t get me wrong, clubs exist to meet people, and it’d be awesome if you met the exact people you hope to encounter with similar interests.
- Because people join the club for the wrong reason, the club becomes driven by instability. The activity becomes a means to an end instead of just something you do for the thing itself. Social relations are awesome, but the function of the club shouldn’t be undermined. If too many people join for the means to an end, the means itself erodes.
- Niche interests then become less mainstream, and people instead fill those desires for knowledge by online entertainment reflecting those topics, thereby reducing the engagement with them and reinforcing the passivity that got them into this mess in the first place.
Now because it then becomes so difficult to meet new people, and actualize those functions of his life he seeks to personify and engage with, those few legacy friends, or his girlfriend if he has one, become the default absorbers of those desires. People in general want to engage with the topics that provide them a mental or intellectual spike. So the girlfriend becomes both the best friend, philosophical sparring partner, mentor, sports buddy and so on.
It’s not that you expect them to be this, but given you interests you will develop your thoughts on those topics by formulating them and expressing them to this person. She won’t know what to say because why would she know anything about Agrippa, deadlifting techniques, matrix multiplications, or the whole ecosystem of a football club. So she will always underdeliver on engagement with those topics and leave room for more. So a kind of gap fills in the relationship, that in my experience I wrongfully attribute to a sort of mismatch between the partners. But this isn’t true at all. All the fundamental stuff can be just right, you just overload the relationship with other substance (or lack of).
To make the analogy with statistics. Say we have a typical regression model within our minds that constitutes the following:
Quality of thinking on topic j = β0 + β1*(Friend A) + β2*(Friend B) + β3*(Friend C) + β4*(Partner) + ε
Then each beta related to a friend or partner constitutes our ability to engage with that person on a certain topic. If the topic I’m interested in is Extreme Value Theory, then the ideal statistics friend isn’t observed in my model, and the unobserved effect enters the error term (take the analogy with a theoretical grain of salt). Yet because we’re interested in this, we keep discussing this topic with the remaining people in our model, and so the regressors become correlated with the error term. Essentially we arrive at a model misspecification where the regressors become correlated with the omitted source of engagement. That’s omitted variable bias, and means the conversations about the topics with one of our observed persons will perhaps feel slightly right, but never really be right. The variables we have in our model are poor proxies for what we really need, and so misspecify the true effect of Quality thinking on a topic. It will never allow us to go deep on a topic and engage with it, we won’t arrive at a Quality experience on that topic, and more importantly our engagement with the topic spirals into passivity and we’ll fill the gaps with watching someone else engage with the topic ~ online.
In other words, the problem isn’t that my partner or friends are failing me. The problem is that I’ve built a social model in which too few variables are expected to explain too much. Now the logical solution is to enter more variables. It’s just something I, and I suppose many people really, struggle with. Why?
My idea is that there’s various root causes for this development:
- On the one hand, there’s the dilemma of the split personality: I mentioned before how the structure of people’s life seems to force them into splitting themselves into a person A and person B. Where A is that version of themselves which is formally schooled, but because of the merit (and danger) of specialization this version is hyper developed in one particular area while having neglected many other areas (I.e., their whole person is heavily skewed towards perfection in area contributing relatively little to the whole of his life). Person B is then the left-over part which has trouble developing and is heavily neglected. It is then the person’s responsibility, unfortunately never communicated as such to him, to develop this and make it something meaningful to him.
- On the other hand, there’s the seeming degradation of the fabric of society. This really becomes obvious when comparing modern times with the life and times of Benjamin Franklin. Every interest would turn into a society or club. You learn through people, and as such many overlapping communities exist where people know each other but the people themselves aren’t the object of the club, the topics are. To a certain extend this seems to still be a thing in Anglo-Saxon countries, but unfortunately I’ve never known this to be mainstream here in Belgium. But I sense the problem remains. The structure of information sourcing has becomes so fundamentally different that people creating or joining clubs for the sole sake of an interest are necessarily there primarily for the social aspect of it.
So we have both a problem of overloading relationships as well as the seeming reduction of social functions which exist for no other reason than the subject at hand. Both sort of keep each other alive.