Approximate read time: 5 minutes
I don't think I've ever really fit in well with others, especially groups of others. Thinking back to friendships throughout childhood and adolescence I often believe I stood to the side of friend groups, staying (or being kept) at arm's length. I recall (whether accurately or not) that my place was never among the core group. As I've gotten older and reflected on my life I find myself considering relationships between myself and others more and more. How can I improve ones that are valuable to me? When is it appropriate to end them? Despite struggling with emotions and building relationships, I think about them quite regularly. As I've grappled with these questions and explored my own relationships, I've found a curious parallel in computer science, of all places.
What if we looked at human connections like a graph, a concept from computer science used to visualize complex data and relationships? In a graph, the 'nodes' could be seen as individuals, while the 'edges' are the invisible bonds connecting them - the shared stories, experiences, or interactions. They can form expansive mappings of complex relationships that aren't apparent when looking at an individual node or series of nodes, but upon zooming out can help illustrate how they share connections.
I started using this visualization while standing on the 92nd story of One Vanderbilt (the Summit experience) on a recent trip to New York. Looking down the nauseating height at car and foot traffic below I started to consider the relationships between everyone. Each person connects with countless others, and those people share their own countless connections. On the scale I find myself picturing, it's a jumbled mess. Thousands of nodes with thousands of edges between them. Like someone that decided to take up bullet journaling, then got frustrated with it and just started scribbling all over the page.You might get a similar visualization looking at a complex subway map like New York City or Tokyo. Dozens of subway lines, hundreds of stations, all weaving together to form some unified chaos. A story of the connective tissue of a city, and how different pieces relate to each other. Now imagine the complexity of every major city subway system superimposed on one another. It would be something you could conceptually understand and maybe even rationalize for a short period of time, but as more and more stations were added to the image you'd eventually lose all sense of it. Reduced purely to an image of lines and dots. Edges and nodes. An increasingly chaotic tangle of connections.
This is where it starts to get away from me. The nodes increase, and their edges with them until looking dozens of stories down to a busy street below is filled with nothing but tangled lines. Sometimes connecting clearly with nodes around them. Sometimes trailing off into the distance to a node that is well out of sight, even from where I stand -- reaching its counterpart thousands of kilometers away. The line having circumnavigated the globe in order to continue connecting two people such a vast distance apart. One goes about their daily life in Manhattan, hurriedly walking to work while the other serves people at a dinner buffet at the resort they work at. Not all connections need to be strong to persist. Sometimes just a pleasant exchange is enough to solidify that line between two, only being severed when one can no longer remember the other.
We've all got far more lines that I think we can even recognize. It's damn near impossible to say for sure, but a reasonable approximation is that the average number of people you'll meet in your lifetime is 10,000. Undoubtedly you've forgotten more than you've ever met. And most certainly some of the lines that connected you with others were incredibly thin and have long since evaporated. A moment of eye contact on a bus, or brushing up against them at a concert. Enough of a connection that you'd both remember the other for a day or two, but your line wouldn't last longer than that, and at best you'd have a hint of the memory of that person -- never enough recollection to reform your connection to them.
Is it unsettling to you that you've forgotten more people than you remember? Take a moment and try to recall every person in any grade school class. Take another and try to recall every person in a different grade, or at a different school you encountered during sporting competitions, community center activities, summer camps. At one point in your life those lines were solid. And maybe some still are, but most are long gone. Even if you recall someone specific from that time, who can say you're one of the people they still remember well? A severed line. Stories forgotten.
It really does start to get away from me the more I sit with it, and I haven't mentioned the mind-boggling complexity that comes from following connections through to someone else entirely. If we'll meet 10,000 people in our lifetime and they'll meet 9,999 other people, our connections expand to just shy of 100 million. It's enough to immediately feel wrong (I welcome you to do the math on your own). And now that we're on that train of thought, let's go to the third connection. It brings us just shy of 1 trillion connected nodes. A number so grand it's damn near incomprehensible. Does “6 degrees of Kevin Bacon” (the notion that any person can build their own connected web from themselves to Kevin Bacon in 6 steps) even surprise us with numbers that large? The fact that we don't all have a Kevin Bacon story at the ready is honestly harder for me to believe. Of course those lines aren't still there for all 10,000, nor their own 9,999, so luckily my anxiety and panic can chill out a bit.
Why does this even matter to me? Well, it doesn't really, at least not regularly. It's the nature of an intrusive thought. It shows up sometimes under various circumstances, and then takes hold. Once it does it doesn't take much before it finds its way into the central pieces of my brain and I get lost trying to compute and conceptualize the level of connections. What's the farthest distance I have a connection on the planet? At what point in my connection chain do I hit someone who has gone to space? How long until I reach someone who has saved a life? Has taken a life? I'm not so naive to think that these things haven't happened, but I'm also not so self-righteous to think that it means anything to have this connection. Every now and then, however, it does stop me in my tracks.
As I look down from 92 stories up, envisioning the lines of edges trailing off from one node to the next, or while I stand beside someone at a concert feeling a new edge form between us as the band plays, the reality becomes clear. We exist in this world of lines – some haphazardly scribbled, and some well defined and clear. We're woven together in what could seem like a chaotic network of connections, yet there's a certain beauty in its intricate complexity. As a species our graph reaches levels of complexity that are incomputable. We exist as an unfathomable number of edges and nodes. And while I often reflect on a life of feeling like an outsider, I take comfort in realizing that in this vast, tangled web of human connection, I've always been a part of it. I've always been connected.