The Sentinel #5: On Being A Terrible Pandemic Friend
Notes on asymmetry of good friendships.
A once-in-a-century event like the covid-19 pandemic upends lives in unknowable ways. In the US, we have lost more Americans to covid than all wars in the last hundred years.1 Even though thousands have died all over the world (the pandemic is still on in China), it is hard to say how things will change us in the long term.
The 1918 flu took 50 million lives, on the heels of a calamitous global war that was supposedly fought to end all wars. Yet, during my childhood, no traces of that pandemic had survived in the memories of the older generations, compared to the long shadows cast by the world wars, or the struggle for Indian independence. In fact, the Spanish flu had become a footnote in our folk history until the covid pandemic.
Yet, living through the pandemic, we know it altered our inner lives perceptibly. To be honest, many days seemed quite unremarkable. Yet, those unremarkable days have augured in many remarkable changes: including this newsletter. I suppose that in strife, dreams bloom.
Using my notes made during the pandemic, I take stock of three big changes, that the slow-moving hurricane of covid-19 had caused: Friendships, Gender & Workforce, and Remote Work. In this essay, I focus on the topic of …
Friendships
Mihir Desai, a Harvard Professor, said it best in one of his podcasts,
“Covid made a better father and worse friend”.
This is indeed true for me.
I realize the conceit, as it is hard to rate oneself objectively as a parent. Not that I am bad at parenting. (I can’t stand that gerund “parenting”). I just don’t know what good “parenting” is supposed to look like. It is a weird agency problem. The output seems to heavily depend on the effort you put in, at that moment, but the true outcomes lay far out in an unseeable future. As a parent, you know that those future outcomes are not so much in your control.
There is also no good way to judge a successful outcome. Surely, parents can be proud of their child’s achievements. However, achievements can happen, as it does to many, even without good parenting. Good parenting, like a good grounding in philosophy, as philosopher Michael Sandel says, doesn’t necessarily lead to a better person.
Sometimes, to be a parent is just to put in the time. Not “quality time”, just time. 10,000 hours or whatever.
During the pandemic closures, our children were at home with us. Mostly, like everyone, we were waiting out the pandemic: first, the uncertainty of its brutal scale, then the unknown next waves, then the unexpected goodbyes and the persistence of memories, the miracles of science and engineering, the apparently broken supply chains (I’ll write more on this), the interminable wait lists for vaccines and then ensuing skepticism, the chaotic tradeoffs between freedom and safety. We lasted through all of these vagaries in a cocoon sewn by the kindred threads of our loved ones.
Imagine for a moment being asked to do something that you love, something like cooking, gardening, or playing a musical instrument. Now, imagine that you were even good at the task. Often, you can get a “feel” for your chosen task. If you riffed on the piano, you could hear yourself as you played and say “That was good!”. No such feeling exists with hanging out with young children.
Yet, that is mostly what I did. Hanging out. For sure, there were those moments of bliss — a highly focused state of natural existence, that the author Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi termed as being in “flow”.2 So, at best, as a parent, one just goes with the flow. In retrospect, I don’t know if I did anything right. I am not even sure which specific activities worked. The only fact I know is that I spent long periods of time, doing things that we did together as a family with kids. Sometimes at the expense of other pulls and responsibilities.
Friendship: Social Media and WFH
All that time is finite. If your goal is to spend time with family and children, it must all come from somewhere else in life. We go through life making these temporal choices of where and on whom we should focus our time on. This is not a new finding. Ancient Indian scriptures identify samskaras — the imprints of time on your life depending on the stage of life you are in.
In my case, during covid, I became a worse friend to most people.
Of course, we cannot be friends with everyone. The limit to friends one could have is nowadays popularly signified by the Dunbar Number3 (often stated to be 150), originally proposed by anthropologist Robin Dunbar, as a cognitive limit on group size deduced from the relative neocortex size of the human brain. Clearly, not everyone has the same limit. Robin Dunbar himself mentions that there is a lot of variation across people, and the number could be anywhere between 100 to 250. The confidence interval on this number is so large, that is unclear whether one can pursue any kind of validity for a single number. In any case, some cognitive limit exists on the number of people we could possibly remember. The existence of some sort of limit is just an acknowledgment of our cognitive limitations.
It is tempting to think of circles of friendships in the figure as intrinsic properties of cognitive limitations alone. However, there must be macro social forces at work that affect how these circles — which are amorphous porous zones really — are distributed.
Good Friendships are Asymmetric.
As always, the self is at the center of things. Everyone prioritizes, often without major tactical consideration, how they reduce, dilute or strengthen their various relationships. As health and family take focus, friends move in and move out. Everyone differs in how they reorganize their lives. These changes naturally lead to an open secret: Good friendships are often naturally asymmetric.
This beautiful truth underlies the quadrant chart by Tim Urban at Wait by Why.4 Friendships don't have to always make sense. Some friendships thrive because the pair can freely exist in different quadrants at different points in time. (Alice enjoys the time spent with her friend Bob. Bob trusts Alice more than anyone else, even if he currently enjoys hanging out with others more). This friendship may not seem “ideal”. But, our lives are also not ideal. Good friendships are bound by non-ideal lives. A good friend waits.
I argue that such an asymmetry is the key to a nurturing friendship. If every pair of friends agreed upon attributes and their feelings were synchronized all the time, we wouldn’t need two axes in Urban’s quadrant plot.
Friendship Curve: A Model
All of these pictures regarding friendship don’t speak directly to how our priorities are influenced by the world itself. A good model to think of external forces on friendship is to use a friendship distribution. Below, I draw a roughly Gaussian distribution5 of the friendships — with “you” in the center.
The height of the curve at a location signifies the strength of friendship with the friend at that location. The higher the curve, the stronger your friendship with that person who is at that point.
The distance from you on the curve could be a measure of the distance of friendships in a socio-geographic space. (You can use a mix of metrics to determine this distance: how far they live from you, how often you call them, and even how asymmetric your relationship is). It is helpful to think of this relationship as a rank order. If you ranked all the people in a non-increasing order of friendships, starting yourself at zero, the closest friends are at the nearest ranks and the farthest friends are at the furthest distance.
Social Media Flattens Friendships
What social media effectively does is expand the geography of friendships. Such an expansion, given our limited time and capacity, has an important effect. Due to the addition of wider friendships, the nearest friendships have to make way to accommodate distant connections.
Social media truly flattens friendships. It makes strong connections weaker, and weaker connections, perhaps even non-existent connections, somewhat stronger than before. Perhaps, the strength of such weak ties, going back to Granovetter’s work is important in professional careers.6 Having a number of social media friends certainly helps with celebrity, popularity, and the celebration of one’s life’s work. However, I wonder what it does to our personal lives.
COVID Heightened Friendships
Even as the usage of social media and the internet increased, the pandemic moved everyone to their inner worlds. It pruned your time to mirror the difficulties of householding. In our case, we spent days with family worrying about our extended family in India, the memories of departed lives, and staying afloat at work (the source of manna that keeps your livelihood flowing) so that we could savor our days with the people we loved.
An underappreciated silver lining of the pandemic: it was an antidote to the ills of social media.
It strengthened close friendships mostly at the expense of the distant weak ranks. Of course, as always ranks got resorted (ranks change in the pictures) departed friends and friendships that moved closer. I remember a friend I lost during the pandemic, with whom I spent countless summer days hiking. Once as young teens, sheltering from an afternoon thunderstorm, we saw a bolt of lightning flash down and cleave a distant lone palm. In the first wave of the pandemic, just like that tree, he was suddenly gone, overnight, leaving the cinder of the loss etched in our souls.
The story of the covid pandemic was one that attenuated your mind to things that you could preserve. We persevered and held tighter to things that were close to us, within our hand’s grasp.
As the pandemic is now behind us (mostly), I hope to reinvent the magic middle. I am hoping to rebuild overlooked bonds, with friends near and dear, with colleagues and our professional lives; people we care about and haven’t had the time to worry about. Mostly telling stories and listening. This newsletter is a part of the effort.
Next up, Bullwhip Effect and Gender effects in the labor force, by looking at how familial life and work arrangements have changed after the pandemic.
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American Deaths in Various Conflicts.
Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience.
Yeah, it’s healthy pruning. Don’t be fazed by the loss of friends, because it’s an opportunity to go off and make new friends, which may turn out to be even better.
Quadrant Figure from WaitbutWhy.com
This Gaussian picture considers the gradient of the friendship hill. Is your friendship hill a gentle long hike spread over many friends, or a brazen cliff limited to a few?
Granovetter, Mark. 1973. The Strength of Weak Ties. American Journal of Sociology. https://snap.stanford.edu/class/cs224w-readings/granovetter73weakties.pdf
Friendships and curves! At the start of the pandemic everyone was talking about flattening the curve. May be this was that curve! Nice article. I was humming A.R. Rahman's Mustafa Mustafa all along as I was reading this :) "... Muzhgatha ship'e friendship than." and all that. You should do a follow up on friendship in Indian movies and in particular its songs.