The Formulation of Friendships
The Evolution of the Patented Wynn Lemmons 10,000-Hour Rule of Friendships
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Friendships past 25 usually follow one of two patterns:
Saying “We should hang out!” over and over every 8 months until either one of you dies…
OrSetting appointments 3 months in advance to grab a brief dinner at which you only catch up on about ¼ of the other person’s life (major life events, exclusively), barely scratch the surface of details, and then go on hoping this person you love is doing generally well until the next Harvest Moon that your schedules align.
These outcomes are depressing, and often leave us pining for the unstructured days of our youth in which friendships flowed like honey- your best childhood friend established one summer playing little league, your bridesmaid accrued dissecting frogs in AP Bio, the godfather of your son befriended during that semester in Spain.
The stark loneliness of post-grad life takes many young adults by surprise. The frequency and depth of new relationships you go on to establish changes in subtle ways as you enter early adulthood.
My own path, with its detour through grad school, led me to contemplate precisely how and why this dynamic changes as we get older. My initial conclusions were (jokingly) referred to as the 10,000 Hour Rule of Friendships, where the sheer volume of unstructured time required to form deeply intimate relationships becomes so scarce as an adult that it leads to a drastic reduction in close-knit friendships established. Hence, periods like undergrad and MBA intrinsically allow for the requisite mass of free time necessary to mold and solidify deep connections. I mulled this idea over and came to the conclusion that my rule was directionally true but lacked nuance.
So, I returned to the drawing board, picked a few friends’ minds, and refined my thinking. I’m no mathematician, but I may have cracked the code.
Here are my half-baked conclusions..
Section I: Overview - Formulary & Definitions
I humbly submit to you, the academy, the Wynn Lemmons Theory for the Formulation of Friendships:
Perhaps these relationships aren’t multiplicative, maybe they need some more advanced calculus to define them, but I’ll leave that level of analysis to our future AI overlords. I’m but a simple troglodyte attempting to make sense of his world.
Section II: Applications
Now, each of the relationships in your collective social web is idiosyncratically affected by the ever changing magnitude of those four variables. We will introduce generalized applications below.
Let’s examine how these play out across our lives from childhood through adulthood, with a few scenario specific examples tossed in the mix for good measure.
Chronologically:
Childhood & High School Friendships:
Youthful friendships are defined in large part by continuity as well as volume, hence the large magnitude for Time and Frequency at this stage. Intimacy scores lower, in my opinion. Although the shared traumas of middle school certainly help to mesh many a friendship, I think that (in broad strokes) the driving factor of our youthful relationships which end up forging into lifelong connections is the sheer volume of time spent together. Hence, the early iterations of my 10,000 Hour Rule.
As an elementary or high school student, you are given so many opportunities to ‘fuck around’ together- summers, sports, gym classes, etc. These are pivotal for the socialization of children, and inherent to that is the establishment of meaningful relationships.
All the while, your external factors of Social Entropy are at their lowest. Most kids don’t have a career, bills, taxes, or competing friend groups to contend with. Furthermore, I think the Social Entropy on these friendships for many people is minimized over the course of our lives, due to the ease of opportunities presented for maintaining them.
Tangibly, you make close friends in middle and high school as you see your buddies daily, you interact at lunch, you go to swim meets on weekends. And then, even once you leave for college and early adulthood, it’s easy to find quarterly reconnections when you return for holidays and family events. Oftentimes, mutually intertwined family friendships add an additional deterrent to the effects of Social Entropy long-term.
Childhood friendships are often established by luck and by general particle collision. No one thought deliberately about how their assigned partner for field day in 2nd grade would come to define their formative high school experiences. Yet, the ease with which that spark was fanned by consecutive years of schooling and intermingling extracurriculars allows for decade-long relationships to form before we’ve even left the house.
This has further repercussions as you consider how influential your closest friends, often made by chance in youth, are to your happiness and career success- ideas I’ve examined here and here.
Undergrad & Grad School Friendships:
The undergraduate college experience is probably the single ripest period for gathering lifelong friends. As shown above, you’re firing on all cylinders, baby.
Time is abundant, Frequency is regular, and Intimacy is alcohol-fueled. You’ve got class and maybe a part time job. Thursday nights are for going out, Saturdays are for games, and Mondays are for that one bar that offers the $0.50 beers to an army of moonfaced 19 year-olds with fake IDs. You can, and usually do, live with your best friends, and your late night exchanges range in intimacy from the existential to the aspirational. It’s glorious.
Jokes aside, intimacy increases dramatically in undergrad, empowered by the broken shackles of parental control. You can live, eat, breathe, and sleep with your closest connections (innuendo intentional). Undergrad is the first time that many young adults are completely unbound, and it coincides with the expansion of mind through varied study, diverse conversation, and substances of all manner. These factors culminate to create abundant shared experiences which can form an impregnable foundation for lifelong friends.
Conversely, your Social Entropy increases slightly vs. the K-12 phase of your life, but it’s more than offset by the increase in other life factors. Maybe you have a part time job, some stress around job hunting or grad school applications, but these distractions are generally limited. For most Millennials/Gen Z’ers, neither you nor your friends have any kids, and ample emotional bandwidth is available to nurture new-found connections.
I’ve hammered away at this point before, but this is also why such deep friendships get formed in grad school, and especially business school, programs. Usually grad school applicants have had a few years of crushing early adulthood, and have the further added bonus of being self-aware of the fleeting nature of the academic experience with its unique amounts of unstructured time for collaborating, brainstorming, and plain old kickin’ it.
Adulthood Friendships:
With adulthood, we see the introduction of a new variable: Intentionality. As our old variables left of the minus [T(I)f] decrease significantly and steadily, the right side increases exponentially with each year. In my depressing and humble opinion, the only counterbalance to these offsets which keeps adult friendships alive is intentionality.
Intentionality can take many forms. Monthly check-ins, standing dinner parties, annual girls’ trips all represent intentional efforts to maintain historical friendships. These events are like changing the oil filter for your connections. But it’s not just the big things that define intentionality, as anyone who’s had a serious romantic relationship can surely attest. Little phone calls, random texts, and shared memes comprise the oil that keeps the engine of friendship humming down the highway of life.
That highway is long, and distractions abound. It’s easy to ignore check engine lights and keep plodding your way down the road toward Promotion Vegas or Marriage Milwaukee as you speed to the next milestone. And once you’ve got a few kids screaming in the backseat, the dinging at the dashboard becomes a fainter and fainter reminder of your wilting friendships.
The dissolution is subtle and the entropy is real. This is why intentionality is so imperative.
The volume of Time we can add to ongoing adult relationships falls precipitously in the world of 9-5’s. This is compounded by decelerating Frequency which requires multi-month planning to orchestrate simple dinners. Intimacy is trickier to generalize, but I think it’s not unfair to suggest that it actually tends to decline as your hangouts get less frequent and the amount of ‘catching up’ required with each meeting increases dramatically to dominate the conversation (as opposed to exploring deeper, more emotionally impactful topics).
Friendships in youth often include significant amounts of unstructured time (said ‘fucking around’ mentioned above). This is generally lacking in the scheduled, structured check-ins for maintaining friendships as an adult. This is also why friendships that include overlapping interests, especially active hobbies like cycling, climbing, etc., are easier to maintain.
A prime example of this idea comes from my roommate’s Discord channel with his high school buddies. It’s a highly accessible cyberspace where his group of friends can all ‘hang out’ when they’re online, whether that’s actively gaming together or enjoying separate activities at the computer. From my own life, Words with Wynn is dropping a slice of my mind into your inbox each week, and receiving little texts and updates of sparked thoughts or opposing viewpoints has proven to be a surprisingly pleasant way of keeping in contact. These two examples help to increase some of the variables in our formula. The former situation optimizes for a larger Frequency factor which helps to maintain a healthy volume of unstructured Time for interacting. With the latter, I hope these little pieces feel like an Intentional, and somewhat Intimate, act of sharing my self reflective thoughts, and provide an opportunity for Time/Frequency to grow with any exchanges that come from them.
A couple asides:
Note that the nature of Social Entropy is rather idiosyncratic by relationship. Some friendships can go years without interaction, and pick up right where you left off. Others wilt with about a month’s drought of attention. It’s important to be cognizant of these varying rates of decay when weighing the prioritization of relationships.
Also consider that all of these variables exist on sliding scales. Many of my best friendships may be lacking in regularity or volume, but are counterbalanced by intense Intentionality and thoughtful Intimacy. Time can be accrued in concentrated doses or spread across little sprinklings here and there. The key is being cognizant of the various levers that must be pulled to keep a friendship cruising along.
Scenario Specifically:
Above, romantic relationships and professional aspirations are both possible factors in accelerating Social Entropy. Below, they’re the types of relationships we’re examining, so the SE factor within them is slightly lower.
Romantic Friendships:
Romantic Friendships come in all shapes, sizes, and timespans. But what’s interesting to consider is that new relationships can go from first date to becoming a pillar in someone’s life in such accelerated timeframes (often as little as a few months) due in large part to the combined Intentionality and Intimacy we devote to them. We balance platonic friendships forged over decades with romantic partnerships that have the potential to exponentially grow in their significance. These also often lead to the displacement of friendships elsewhere, given the limitations of our time and emotional bandwidth. This is neither good nor bad, but a reality of life. Relationships of all kinds require trade offs.
Professional Friendships (‘Work friends’):
Ahh, work friends. Alternatively, these could be labeled Friendships of Proximity. These are the types of relationships that score extremely high on Frequency as well as elevated levels of Time, but which keep Intimacy to a minimum. I’ve argued elsewhere about the dire costs of meaningless work relationships, but suffice to say that these emerge from general proximity and usually keep their depth limited to transactional interactions and surface-level discussions.
Section III: Conclusions & Further Research
Social Entropy is a deliberately crafted label. Relationships are connections forged through shared trials- loves and laughs, victories and defeats. They are slippery things with tenuous binds, and the entropy of life is consistently acting to dissolve them. Truthfully, close friendships are rarely severed intentionally so much as bled out through a hundred nicks of canceled plans, competing obligations, and overall neglect…
"Bit by bit, nevertheless, it comes over us that we shall never again hear the laughter of our friend, that this one garden is forever locked against us. And at that moment begins our true mourning, which, though it may not be rending, is yet a little bitter. For nothing, in truth, can replace that companion. Old friends cannot be created out of hand. Nothing can match the treasure of common memories, of trials endured together, of quarrels and reconciliations and generous emotions. It is idle, having planted an acorn in the morning, to expect that afternoon to sit in the shade of the oak.
So life goes on. For years we plant the seed, we feel ourselves rich; and then come other years when time does its work and our [orchard] is made sparse and thin. One by one, our comrades slip away, deprive us of their shade." - Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Wind, Sand, and Stars
I revisit these words as a reminder of the fleeting nature of the precious connections we forge. All things in life are transient, and some of the most meaningful moments are defined by the people that create them.
Nurture your orchard.
- W
Appendix
Finally, it should be noted by the committee that my formulation has potentially revelatory implications when integrated into Prof. S. Squarepants’s Unified Theory on Fun:
Which of course has been outlined as:
