We Weren't Meant to Have This Much Access

If you know me in real life, you know I’ve been obsessing over what technology and social media are doing to us as a society. Specifically, the fact that we’ve never had this much access before. (As you can tell, I make a thrilling happy hour conversationalist…)

And I mean “access” in two forms: when we access media for news and social connection with strangers and maintain access on a more personal level with friends and family.

Never before in history have we had a device strapped to us at all times (quite literally, in the case of Apple watches!) that acts as a portal to the entire world. Through our screens, we are able to learn just about anything — including positive information and neutral updates as well as devastating news, about someone across the world or your very best friend. The world is quite literally at our fingertips.

Not to mention, the number of people we stay connected to is well beyond our capacity for human connection. Before the introduction of social media and even the telephone, when you moved to a new city (or more accurately, a village), you would typically leave your old connections behind, with the exception of exchanging letters if it was a very close friend or a family member. Otherwise, that random person you met at the bar? The barista you befriended? Your neighbor, gym buddy, or friend of a friend? Once you moved to a new city, you no longer maintained a line of communication with these people, let alone knew what they ate for breakfast, lunch and dinner.

But today, we remain connected to people from all seasons of our life, from elementary school to our current “village.” And each of those people can instantly communicate with you at any point in time, via Facebook messenger, Instagram DMs, a comment, or a text. While there’s nothing inherently wrong with remaining connected and fostering long-term friendships, it is important to realize we were simply not designed to carry so many social connections, both online and in real life.

In the 1990s, a professor of evolutionary psychology proclaimed that humans can only maintain about 150 “outer circle” friendships and only five close friendships at any given time. These findings and this determined ideal number has since been coined “Dunbar’s number.”

Am I saying we cut off all communication with the outside world? Or that we reduce our Facebook friends from 1,500 to 150? Absolutely not. This reality is just something to be aware of — and limiting our exposure to our phones and laptops is something worth considering.

There’s another side to this discussion of access: access to bad news. In the middle of a perfectly normal day, you can find out devastating news about a stranger you are connected to on the Internet, or hear of a mass shooting or another national tragedy. While I’m sure you wouldn’t necessarily choose to not hear about these things if given the option, there’s no denying that we just weren’t meant to carry such weight around on our shoulders. I would argue we only have the capacity to know life updates from the people closest to us — specifically, our five closest relationships and 150 “outer circle” friends. Beyond that, it’s extra weight our hearts weren’t meant to bear. And the global state of mental health certainly reflects this.

While I don’t have a solution to this issue, I will say: awareness is the first step in the right direction. And like I mentioned, we do have control over the amount of exposure we have and attention we give to our phones. It’s important to create boundaries with your phone, so you don’t become a slave to whatever or whoever sets off a buzzy notification in your pocket.

You could go as far to create “office hours” for yourself, outside of which you are relatively unreachable (aside from emergencies, of course). If that feels too extreme, a practical way to limit access and ‘round-the-clock communication is by automatically setting up “Do Not Disturb” (on iPhones) that turns on and off at certain hours (mine is on from 10 p.m. to 7 a.m. every night). And by the way, if you’re worried about missing emergency calls, you can set yours to allow calls from specific people or to accept the second call within three minutes from the same person.

Whatever you do, let’s remain conscious of our relationships — and understand our limits.