Thanks for signing up to all the new readers! Here are some nuggets about how networks shape your wellbeing, relationships and community to help you actively cultivate yours.
Wellbeing
If you’re a fan of Dan Ariely’s Irrational Labs, you will probably enjoy their take on Reframing the Loneliness Epidemic. In this piece, they reflect on years of academic experiments that haven’t improved outcomes and argue that the challenge needs to be reframed in order to make progress. They also share two experiments they’ve completed to shed light on what they call the “lack-of-friendship epidemic”.
While there are many possible ways to encourage friendships, we know at least one path that can help: Having deeper conversations. Our findings? Instead of allowing people to fall back on the lowest common denominator of conversation, we changed the norms and steered them away from small talk by giving them topics to talk about. Doing this took pressure off the individual, putting the hard task of being vulnerable on the shared social infrastructure, and with it, they also got a high return of social dividends.
That’s exactly what Georgie and I were striving for with our Conversations podcast mini-season. You can listen to it here.
Relationships
“I hold this to be the highest task of a bond between two people: that each should stand guard over the solitude of the other. For, if it lies in the nature of indifference and of the crowd to recognize no solitude, then love and friendship are there for the purpose of continually providing the opportunity for solitude. And only those are the true sharings which rhythmically interrupt periods of deep isolation.”
—Rainer Maria Rilke
A interesting sentiment for our time, which I surfaced in one of Maria Popova’s posts. It’s full of references to this tension, which is often discussed in the context of marriage, but is relevant for any close relationship.
Community
Long overdue, but I finally finished reading Heat Wave by Eric Klienberg. He introduces the concept of a social autopsy as a means to understand the behavioural, social, and system-level contributors to death in a community. He applies it to the 1995 Chicago Heat Wave, which killed a disproportionate number of people. Since, social autopsies have been used in many contexts, from understanding elevated maternal and child deaths to suicide in men.
One of the details of the book that hit me the hardest was the number of unclaimed bodies of people who died during the disaster. I did a little digging and came across this fascinating site for Hart Island, New York City’s cemetery for the unclaimed dead. While only around 30% of people buried there have unknown or unreachable next of kin, it still feels devastating that people so isolated in life are similarly isolated after death.
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About The Reliants Project
Reliant is my word for a person that someone depends on, an essential component of our social networks. With each edition, I’ll share useful nuggets about how networks shape your wellbeing, relationships and community to help you actively cultivate yours. Whether you want to cultivate your relationships, make better introductions, or activate networks to make an impact in the world, let me help you reach your goals.
You can find more about The Reliants Project here.