Be more for fewer people

You've heard of Dunbar's number, right? It's 150, and it's the number of social links you can maintain in your head (Dunbar said so). This has a wide array of important consequences – for example, any attempt to befriend every 1st-gen Pokémon is mathematically doomed – but not all hope is lost! First, simply acknowledge the limitations of your monkey brain. Next, use said brain to think about ways you can operate within those limitations while still pursuing a fulfilling social life. Finally, gradually adapt your behavior to align with those principles. That's it! Three easy steps and you're well on your way to living a Dunbar-approved life.

Okay, maybe I should be more specific. The problem with that is everyone's different – we all harbor unique ways of socializing, varying capacities for social connectivity, and different ways of mitigating social overload. I don't think I can distill this mantra into any broadly applicable advice. So, I'd discourage you from interpreting it as advice – this is just what works for me, or least what I hope will work for me in the long run.

Being more for fewer people means focusing your social energy. Think of "focus" in the optical sense – you have a naturally limited store of social energy, and trying to spread it across a broader area only serves to diminish its perceived brightness. If you only have a single AA battery's worth of social energy to work with (really milking this analogy, I know), would you rather try to power a floodlight or a laser pointer? Which one do you think would be more interesting to look at?

For a long time, I thought I was too scared to send people direct messages. It's certainly a more vulnerable form of communication, but is it really scary? When I left Twitter, I quickly realized that the prospect of DMing people wasn't nearly as anxiety-inducing as the picture I had painted in my head. The reality was that I was comfortable defaulting to sharing things with larger groups of people. It turns out that the opposite of "comfortable" isn't always "uncomfortable" – sometimes it's just novel.

Being more for fewer people is one of my mantras, and an attribute of a high-quality friend.