Last column before the great Grinch apocalypse. No, I am not, I only confess that I am aware of the change of signifier and meaning that some losses entail when these dates arrive. Even so, most of us have been meeting friends, acquaintances and colleagues for weeks and we will meet or mismeet on Tuesday with those closest to us. So let me move away a little from the usual quagmire of which, on the other hand, I have already offered you my vision during all the past weeks. Or maybe I’m not going to go too far away, they’ll tell me.
I read an interview in The Country to Robin Dunbar, the famous Oxonian anthropologist who estimated the number of friends that a human being can have at 150. Dunbar’s number is not, in his opinion, capricious since it is based on scientific observations made on the social interactions of various people. groups of primates and the weight and size of the cerebral neocortex in each of them. That of the human species takes us to that limit of 150 friends, distributed according to the wise man in several layers, like onions, from the core to the periphery. Thus, in the intimate nucleus there would be about five people, those to whom we would turn in case of a vital problem, some of whom are also a couple or family. In the next layer there would be about ten people with whom we develop most of our social life and in the next the fifty whom we would invite without hesitation to a party and in the last place those whom, without hesitation, we would greet in a airport with a talk. I heard this same theory from a more traditional person some time ago with a Madrid metaphor: there are the people from the central almond, the friends who travel along the M-30 of our lives, those who circulate on the M-40 and, finally, those of the M-45 and the M-50. Beyond that it’s nonsense, only strangers circulate. This story ended with a somewhat hopeless reflection: we must be attentive and realize when a person has left the center to the M-30 or when he has walked away to the M-40 without warning or with drums and trumpets.
#M30 #onions
