If you call, who will come running?

Of the gazillion social media that one can now spend time on, the only one that I use is Twitter.  The best part of twitter is this--I don't have to be friends with anybody. I don't have to follow anybody. I can be my own, and yet keep track of whatever it is that interests me.

I used to be on Facebook.  Throughout the years that I used Facebook, I had a difficult love-hate relationship with that medium.  Not only because I was worried about the technology snooping into our lives and making money out of it, but also because I couldn't relate to the artificial "friendship" there with "friends" commenting about every damn thing, even though I knew very little about them in the real world.  Almost all of them were not really anywhere close to being my "friend."

Even back in high school, I didn't have many friends--according to the way I defined what friendship was.  If I didn't share anything close to my innermost feelings, they weren't friends but were merely classmates.  There were a couple of them who were friends.  Like this guy, when we were really young. And later this friend.

I have always firmly believed that it is impossible to be friends with many.  Again, a reminder that I am not using a loose definition of friendship.  We now have more and more scientific evidence to back me up:

Study after study confirms that most people have about five intimate friends, 15 close friends, 50 general friends and 150 acquaintances (green bars).

To me, a friend is what that previous sentence refers to as "intimate friend."  The rest are acquaintances.

Yes, we humans are social animals.  But, that social behavior is not the same as friendship.  Why?

This threshold is imposed by brain size and chemistry, as well as the time it takes to maintain meaningful relationships, Dunbar says. “The time you spend,” he adds, “is crucial.”

We have limited time, and there is only so much that we can spend on anything including friendship.

Which means, you, too, have an easy metric that you can honestly use in the privacy of your home.  Ask yourself how much time you have spent over the last year or two with people who are not related to you.  And rank them by the time you have spent with them. Right?