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Circle of Friends and The Paradox of Choice

There are 7.6 billion people on earth. In our lifetime, we will probably only meet and interact with around 50,000 people, give or take a few thousand. This number is likely to have increased over time, given improvements in transport as well as affordability/accessibility, improved technology and a wider use of social media. 

It is quite overwhelming to think of how many people are out there who could potentially be your friends or your partner, and yet, the circle of people we know is a tiny fraction of 7.6 billion. Furthermore, within your circle of people there is an even smaller circle that you actually consider and recognise as your friends and who you interact with frequently. 

There's always someone better suited to being your friend or someone better suited to being your partner. So why do we settle for what we've got when there's a whole world of new people to meet? 

Firstly, I think that people are a lot more similar to one another than we think, with only a few people displaying 'rare' personality traits and most people having quite common personality traits and common interests. This makes getting along with people quite easy.

Secondly, there's the convenience of friendship; the inconvenient truth. This is a rather cynical viewpoint, but consider the friends you made in your primary school, then the friends you made at secondary school, university, work etc. Each time you moved on from those places where you would  see them everyday, how many of them did you stay friends with? Probably not very many. We make friends for convenience if we know we have to see them everyday and it's better to build a 'quid pro quo' relationships than to not make friends at all. 

Thirdly, there are just too many people to consider. From dating apps to picking the right pair of jeans, we think that the more choice we have, the better it is for us. But having too many options can actually create anxiety through indecision, and leave us less satisfied when we're not sure if we've made the right choice. 

This is known as 'The Paradox of Choice' - a good book by Barry Schwartz. Schwartz identifies two kinds of people: maximisers, who want to find the absolute best option, and satisficers who want to find something that is good enough and not worry that something better might be out there. Maximising is said to be linked with the high and increasing incidence of clinical depression in the developed world and satisficing is said to be the best option for coping in a world in which we are overwhelmed with choice. 

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