I see my friends being tagged by the same people on Facebook, hang out with the same people at work, on road trips, overseas, interstate, daily brunching and lunches mostly Western and Asian cuisines. On Snapchat and Instagram, their pictures of them at birthday parties, music festivals, pet farms, trending restaurants, food trucks, sporting matches and formal cocktail events certainly puts more than a tear to my eye. As I see my friends’ long Snapchat stories, tears begin to trickle down my face. I hear their laughter, see their smiles, challenging their kidneys with shot after shot after shot of tequila and sackfuls of goon. Although the scenery is chaotic and messy, I can’t fathom the fact that my friends are having the time of their life. I know there are some people out there who are currently trapped in a similar social predicament. Depending on the season, I see photos of them in their bikinis, swimwear, sportswear at the sporting courts, stadiums, beaches, cafes, restaurants, overseas destinations and running dry tracks. It is by then I’m so agonised to question my friends for being left out of the pack. However as my nose begins to sniff, I somehow refrain myself in search of the truth. I’m worried that by asking why I’m always the unlucky and forgotten one, my friends may view me as attention-seeking, a desperate whinging and pathetic peer and possibly downplay my calls for my presence at future events.
When my parents oversee my depressed state of mind, they don’t realise their words aren’t helping to improve the situation. They blatantly believe my friends are absent-minded and have the worst behaviour concluding they hate me in general. I obviously didn’t believe such nonsense. My parents have little to no experience for what it’s like to have an eventful and fun life around people. I feel they want to pull my social status down to their level; abysmal, so they can feel relieved they aren’t the only ones feeling this inexperienced socially. My parents are overprotective, cautious about their safety with the risk of spiked drinks and alcohol-fuelled violence which I can understand. A risk quite small in reality that is somehow adequate for those parents to leeway to say NO. They think that preventing their children from entering an environment where brawls or embarrassing moments are always eminent is a rightful and responsible act of parenting. The possible reasons for their verbal decision is that they have read negatively biased (Chinese) newspaper articles regarding the dangers of attending parties of any sort including birthday parties or their lack of experience and knowledge of attending parties is contributing heavily to their lack of commitment to face any risks, albeit minute. I attempted to question their way of thinking and dig out relevant sections of their past but to no avail. They kept defending themselves with the same annoying, rehearsed responses to any personal question I throw at them and the conversation wouldn't travel in any direction whatsoever. I just cannot get through the great wall that guards my parents’ psyche. What will it take to soften their mood and reveal their true story for all to hear? Even their closest friends and relatives receive similar sarcastically positive, solemn and humorous responses. Why are they acting so fishy publicly and privately? Can’t they understand their behaviour and verbal responses are making them fishy? Is it just me or are they afraid of being interrogated from not just authorities but anyone in general including their own son? Whatever Chinese war movies they watch the content certainly has plagued their minds.
To be honest I don’t think I’m in any circle of friends. I might be too aware, too conscious and too anxious of the uncertainty of my position and lack of belonging within the group. It seems everyone around me is engulfed by drama and gossip expressing overreactive verbose to innocuous experiences and common unproven rumours. They exert a certain level of unawareness, lack of knowledge and high sense of gullibility. They don’t seem willing to explore outside their current field of knowledge to learn a different breadth of facts and ideas. For instance, those who discuss nothing but fashion, brunches and dinners, social media, holidays, trips with their significant others and circle of friends, progress through school don’t have the curiosity to understand the history, biology, neuropsychology and quantum physics behind their interests. I try to avoid using offensive terms like “stubbornness”, “dumbness”. “idiot”, “nincompoop” and “dunce” because these terms can induce emotional harm and stigma. In reality no one is inherently stubborn, dumb and idiotic. We may learn the same thing in our lifetimes but at different times of our lives. When we lack knowledge in something, we subconsciously ask ourselves questions of the possible outcomes of our actions. If these questions involve standard drinks of alcohol, drugs, dancing erratically on the dinner tables, then I call this morbid curiosity. But why do we get morbidly curious even if we are aware of the outcomes of serious injury, possible death, and sheer embarrassment and blackmailing on the internet? Well there is no single reason for this interest in macabre. We feel like we need to stay and watch the drama unfold. It may be an opportunity to update your social media and attract anonymous viewers to your profile and channel, hence increasing your popularity and people will take note of your name. At the same time, our bodies are preparing us for possible danger in case hell breaks loose. When we’re fixated on an exhilarating activity you will experience an adrenaline rush and tsunami of blood gushing through your circulation. This causes you to cheer loudly and jump excitedly in the air whilst shouting obscene language and directives to the participants. Nonetheless, your body is subconsciously alerting you to possible danger at any given moment. If you acknowledge your body’s signals, the secretion of Norephinephrine and Ephinephrine to your skeletal and smooth muscles will allow you to elicit a flight-fight-or-fright response the very instant your eyes detects the first sign of impending death-defying risk. Failure to recognise the danger and you risk losing a limb, your sanity and possibly your life. I'll dig deep into drugs and alcohol and its connections with fun, language and excitement and morbid curiosity in another post.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar's_number
150 is no ordinary 3-digit natural number. This integer represents one of psychology’s most fascinating hypotheses. In the 1990s, British anthropologist Robin Dunbar somehow accidentally came across this number when he was trying to understand why primates devotes time and effort to grooming. According to the Social Brain Hypothesis (or Machiavellian Intelligence Hypothesis), it turns out that primates have larger brains when brought up in socially complex societies. The larger the group, the larger the brain. More technically, the larger its neocortex or frontal lobe. Dunbar proposed that any human or primate around the world would feel comfortable maintaining up to 150 stable relationships. For example, any one person in an organisation or company can maintain stable relationships with 150 other colleagues. If we create more interpersonal relationships, we tend to mentally form our own rules, restrictions and norms to help us prioritise which friends we want to keep within our stable, cohesive group. We then create our own so-called rule-of-three formula:
#6 to 20 — Includes your significant other, best friends (circle of friends) that you always invite to a sleepover, dinner at a family home or a restaurant, birthday party or a fun day at the movies or road trip to a festival or carnival. You interact with these people intimately not just in romantic relationships but also platonic relationships and more importantly, in emergencies.
#21 to 55 — These people are on your waiting list to complete your circle of friends if one leaves the pack due to a breakup or a fight at work, at a party or at school. If your best friends are not available for interaction, you will think of these people next when you want a long-awaited catchup or a deep conversation.
#56 to 150 — This includes your casual friends, whom you’d consider inviting to your party to make up the numbers. Depending on your personality and communication skills, this number can range from as low as 40 to as high as 100. You meet them at least once a week in a lecture, a meeting, at school, on a sporting field etc.
#151 to 500+ — These include your acquaintances whom you rarely see in public. You may meet them as frequently as once or twice a month, or as rarely as once a year on the streets or on public transport. You would often forget these people and it can be difficult remembering how you met these people in the first place.
In reality, the above representation of a person’s reallocation and prioritisation of their friends and family will fluctuate depending on how many friends you have or how socially active and popular you are in society. Dunbar’s number may be smaller for introverts and vice versa for extroverts. But, what is for certain is that the equilibrium of everyone’s rule-of-thumb when nominating friends is close to Dunbar’s number of 150. You would naturally move your friends up and down the list in your head depending on how often you interact with them and whether you learn any new information from your conversations with them. If Dunbar’s number is consistent for any group in any tradition, culture, organisation, family and tribe, how do each individual person choose who will be their friend(s) for life or acquaintance they occasionally invite to their party? Answering this question is no easy task and it can make me hate my friends even more.
Children in primary school often make friends with those with common interests and passions such as favourite movies, sports, celebrities, fictional characters or activities. They would associate with them through these common interests, likes and dislikes as they subconsciously build a personal profile of their new friend. In addition they would bombard their new friend with a series of questions regarding their opinions on certain things they predict would have a decent knowledge base on. Sooner or later two children of opposite genders would begin a romantic relationship with one another and this is no different to people of all other ages. As children mature through high school, university, adolescence and finally adulthood, they learn the morals and rules of society and gain interests and passions they wish to pursue as a career. This is where making new friends becomes trickier. When you’re older, you realise society is much complex than you anticipated and you feel your brain cannot store all this new information hence you feel the need to clear out unused information which you regard as useless or not worth remembering in the long term. Because society is designed to divide and classify us into specific personas based on what we learnt in school and faculties we choose to specialise in, we would have to befriend those within our faculties and it is difficult to befriend others in different faculties. It seems we make an assumption that peers within our faculty would communicate the same way you do, therefore you develop this adhesive social glue with your peers in order to stick with them. This is one of the conditions we form in our heads when forming new friendships as young adults. In some cases we discount those who don’t study within our faculty because we predict their choice of language, lifelong goals, wealth, social status and interests will be contrasting to our own, hence we feel it’s better to be safe than sorry. Other factors that I feel influence the strength of friendships are physical contact, daily interaction, where you live relative to your friend, the way you travel i.e. car, train, tram or bus, wealth, important life skills like a P-Plate driving licence, common hates or enemies. Because I live in Melbourne’s north-western suburbs and most of my friends live the north-eastern, eastern and south-eastern suburbs, it may explain why I rarely get invited to my friends’ birthday parties, catchups with them or asked for guidance and assistance when they're under a cloud. This longing for consistent interaction with the peers I meet along the way through school and now university is difficult to come by and maintaining stable relationships with them has never been made so hard for me. I would often contemplate the point of living if I can’t maintain my friendships, but fate seemingly wants to keep me alive and prolong this pain I’m experiencing at the moment. Around this stage people would give up being human and feel better off in the afterlife where there is no pain. Their friends feel powerless to stop them doing the unthinkable, then become regretful and shameful for letting someone down even they occasionally met them.
I feel, think, and perceive things differently from anyone else so far. I can’t name anyone who share the same mindset as I am. I’m not gullible like most people hence I don’t see the need to exert hate and negativity bias towards the most-hated politicians after reading critical headlines about political correctness or a politically-charged decision. People would criticise me for being too slow to make a statement, un-opinionated or simply being stuck in the middle. I’m one of a few unbiased people going around today. I have this inkling to hear both sides of the debate and then exert logic and reason behind their agreements before passing any immoral and unnecessary judgement towards anyone under the firing line. I agree that this requires time, vigilance, temperament, patience and perseverance, but the effort of searching for the truth will be nothing short of painstaking. This may explain why I can’t associate with those who have a spiteful attitude towards those who allegedly will threaten to disrupt their conservative and liberal way of life according to Rupert Murdoch’s media outlook.
I feel the definition of “friend” has changed a lot since the invention of social media in the late 1990s. Although we are inclined to increase our number of Facebook friends, Instagram and Twitter followers, which provides ample opportunities for connections and endless messaging, it does have its downfalls. In spite of my messages not being lost when sent to a friend, it doesn’t have the important elements you see in face-to-face conversations. Even with a profile picture, the prevailing anonymity still prevents me from hearing your voice, recognising your appearance live, reading your real emotions live, utilising my vocals and wit to entertain you with my quirky humour and exerting limerence with you. This may aggravate a person’s loneliness rather than alleviate it. Real-life chatting is literally not the same as inserting words and emojis on a screen and sending it to your friend through speech bubbles. Our brains can’t utilise all of our cognitive senses to help self-stimulate us making our conversations boring. This may explain why my conversations with virtually everyone ends with a short abrupt “ok”, “yes” or “no” and it is rather disappointing to witness a conversation end like it always does. Why do I always have to provide the spark to light up the conversation once again? Why can’t a normal online conversation involve both parties taking turns sharing unique experiences and ideas? Apparently answering these deep questions is more complex that I could ever imagine, hence I’ll delve into the psychology, statistics and technical side of social media in another post.
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