Friends and strangers: How many is enough and why bother with any of them?

I quite like people — not all people, not humanity as a whole, but, as a friendly outgoing person, I like connecting with others. Not everyone does, I get this. But, in my view, being able to respond to new people is a life skill. Whether the connection leads to a lasting relationship or is just a fleeting moment at the bus stop or with one's waiter, the bridge between aloneness and companionship has been crossed, if only for a minute. While I like my own company just fine, the energy that can arise from interacting with others is pretty fine, too.

Though there are limits to the connections we humans can maintain.

According to Robin Dunbar, an evolutionary psychologist, human beings can have a maximum of 150 “meaningful social relationships” including family and friends. Note that “meaningful” doesn’t mean “close”; it means a connection exists in some way between the two of you that has meaning of some kind for you. However, within those many connections, people’s intimate friendships number only five, according to Dunbar. Feel free to go down the rabbit hole of his research (he’s an Oxford professor) to learn more via this NPR interview or this TEDx talk. For me, it’s enough to know that human connection is important (duh!) — and there are also limits to it (oh!). That limit is known as Dunbar’s Number: 150 individuals.

Over the past week or so, I’ve learned something entirely different, though still related to people: Being in the company of strangers can motivate me to do some serious work.

These days, every weekday morning, I get an email announcing the online “Writers’ Hour” will start in 15 minutes. I knew I had signed up for this, having been alerted to the London Writers’ Salon (LWS) by a writing friend, but the first alert caught me off guard nonetheless. I wasn’t showered or dressed, wasn’t properly ‘up’ yet, and didn’t want anything to do with a bunch of strangers exhorting me to write. I ignored that email and the next one and the one after that one, too.

But the alert kept coming in, relentlessly, every morning at 6:45 my time and eventually it clicked with me that I didn’t have to be ‘properly’ up, that I could join the Zoom session with my camera and audio off, and I could just get on with seeing what might happen if I joined this group of strangers writing.

Turns out, it works.

Writers join from around the world, more than 150 of them in the sessions I have joined. And everyone uses the time to write or, as LWS co-founder Matt Trinetti puts it, ‘Use this time to write or use it to do nothing. Nothing else allowed. Write or nothing.’ That’s a useful constraint. I’m not sure why a screen full of strangers should have such compelling impact on my behaviour, but my experience bears it out.

I have written several pieces during the LWS sessions; the pieces are rough, but the ideas are out of my head and onto the page, giving me drafts to continue working with on my own time. And all this before I am properly up.

It’s a bit like the old days of getting away from the home office by settling into the comfy chair in the local coffee shop and working there. But it’s not that, actually. Because I would need to be properly up to leave the house, and the coffee shop would be full of people doing their own thing not the same thing that I am doing, and there would likely be background noise, including music, which would annoy me. In the LWS sessions, silence reigns and everyone online with me is doing the same thing: writing or nothing. And there is both intention and motivation in that.

I have attended online topic-specific workshops and produced drafts in them, too, but this early morning working session with fellow writers from around the world is simply about sharing time and online space, each doing our own writing that ranges from revising PhD chapters to drafting promotional emails to editing chapters of a novel, and more.

The silent companionship of strangers is odd and motivating and productive, too. The other day, it felt good to have written 200 or so words, and to report that accomplishment to the group in the chat at the end, and then to get on with the rest of my day. I might have written those same 200 words without those strangers on my screen, I’ll never know. I won’t know those other writers, either, and that’s just fine by me. Their faces on the Zoom screen is all the connection I need from them at 7 o’clock on a weekday morning when I am still in my pyjamas. 

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Land acknowledgement: I respectfully recognize that I live on the original lands of Anishinaabe, Cree, Oji-Cree, Dakota and Dene peoples, and on the homeland of the Métis Nation.

Photo by Chris Montgomery on Unsplash