How many friends can we really have?
https://www.newyorker.com/science/maria-konnikova/social-media-affect-math-dunbar-number-friendships
The Limits of Friendship by Maria Konnikova
Robin Dunbar, an anthropologist and psychologist and the University of Oxford, came up with a series of numbers that the average person could have in her social group. The number of casual friends, for example, is 150. The number of close friends is 50. What’s more interesting is that the numbers have stayed roughly the same even in the era of social media.
This is particularly fascinating because intuitively, it might seem like social media have opened up the world for many of us, and there is usually no upper limit as to how many friends one can connect to on Facebook or Tiktok. However, we can apply knowledge of strong and weak ties to this phenomenon. Any human connection requires an investment of time and effort to maintain, and even more so for strong ties. Since there is only a fixed amount of time in a day and people can only devote so much energy to relationships, they will eventually reach a limit in terms of how many strong and weak ties they can have at a given time. “We may widen our network to two, three, or four hundred people that we see as friends, not just acquaintances, but keeping up an actual friendship requires resources,” as Dunbar put it.