one fifty yo. "the figure of one fifty seems to represent the maximum number of individuals with whom we can have a genuinely social relationship, the kind of relationship that goes with knowing who they are and how they relate to us. putting it another way, it's the number of people you would not feel embarrassed about joining uninvited for a drink if you happened to bump into them at a bar."



this number seems kind of large doesn't it? one hundred and fifty people? do we even know a hundred fifty people? not just as acquaintances, but people we would perhaps call friends? this is a very interesting observation for me. because i've often thought about at what point are you too saturated with people. if this is true, the number is somewhere around one fifty. this is the limit to how many people you can be involved with at any period in life. one hundred fifty is the number at which you can remain in contact with and still call them your own personal community. or perhaps this number seems excessive because it means one whole community, and not necessarily your own personal definable sphere of community.



in order to build healthy communicative relationships, is this the number to aspire to? i feel personally that one group cannot be too big. about thirty is pushing the limit for interconnectivity and positive feedback and interaction. once you near thirty, it just starts to get too diverse and unwieldy. or maybe that's just because my experiences with large communities is about thirty interconnected people. then again, for most of the bigger culture shows, it was around one fifty to two hundred people, but that was mostly a few different groups who rarely had to interact so i'm not sure if that counts.



it's something to think about. if maybe we're hardwired by biology to accept one fifty as our natural limit.