Staying in touch

How many people do you actually see regularly?

Our consultants are now pondering their Christmas letters, the summary of the year that each sends out with his Christmas cards.  Sending paper things in the mail marks them as highly unusual nowadays, but the practice used to be common.  Most adults had friends and family in distant places, people maybe they’d known growing up who had moved away, or met at college before dispersing to the four winds.  One could stay in touch by phone, but that meant knowing when someone would be at home, and sometimes arranging a long-distance call was difficult and expensive.  Exchanging letters during the year was another way of keeping in contact, but not everyone was inclined to write.  Christmas cards formed the most common way of somehow keeping in touch with people one didn’t see often.  They formed that little extra motivation to get around to writing something.

Of course they were unnecessary for those you saw or talked to often, though you’d send them to everyone anyway.  But how many people are you routinely in touch with?  Our astronomer was at one point very mobile, traveling to various countries and continents for work or vacation (or a combination), and he would take the opportunity to visit people along the way.  They would often remark that he was the only one of some particular group they’d actually seen for several years.  It seems that everyone had a nucleus of immediate family and friends, then a great extended halo of more distant people.  Our astronomer was unusual in visiting the halo now and then.  He was initially rather surprised at this, since he thought of most of his contacts as being rather cosmopolitan.

Of course the analysis of social networks is a highly-developed field, in which we are complete amateurs.  How numerous and ramified any person’s network is depends on many factors, personality and life history being the most obvious.  In addition, in the age of social media and smartphones the distinction between nucleus and halo is harder to maintain.  Where do you put someone on the far coast whom you’ve not visited for ten years, but talk to almost every day?  We still think, though, that your nucleus-group is likely to be smaller than you think it is, and your halo more distant.

This motivates us to consider travels to the halo more seriously, to places and people we normally don’t see or visit.  We realize how fortunate we are that there are many of these.  We are now pondering travel plans for the coming year.

But we haven’t yet worked out what we’ll say in our Christmas letters.