Don't give away your life for marginal value relationships!

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We spread ourselves thin (and  get much less out of life) by spreading ourselves all over the place.  We try to keep up with 10 topics at once, where keeping up on 5 topics may give us four times or more of the value.  We try to juggle all of our relationships so that every one will like us, whereas the extra benefit of the extra people is tiny, even teeny at some point.

Dunbar's Number

5 core relationships, plus maybe a few more of good value at most ...and the value beyond that is so minimal that it is not even worth our time...or, as Ben Franklin might say "it is not worth giving away our lives for!"

Don't even think about trying to keep up 150 relationships just because it is within our cognitive limit!  It would be very "unsmart", in terms of your life value, to do so.

From Celestine Chua:

"even though I wish to be there for everyone, I don’t think I’m able to do this anymore, because it’s causing me to neglect PE, my Q2 goals for PE, and also myself.

Remember Dunbar’s number? I mentioned this in my 2014 review. Dunbar’s number reflects the cognitive limit to the number of people with whom one can maintain stable social relationships. It is proposed that humans can only comfortably maintain 150 stable relationships. In my 2014 review, I mentioned that I’ve long exceeded the Dunbar’s number, and I still feel the same way today. Every day, I feel stretched, burdened, and pressurized into being there for everyone, responding to every communication that comes in, and being a good person to others, so that no one gets neglected. In fact, at times my heart feels stretched (like physically, not metaphorically), which I don’t think is a good thing. I feel like I need to make a call and start saying “no,” starting with closing comments section and prioritizing my communications."

She uses on her site a "target" graph with a central circle, the extra rings around it that are furthere and further out form the center, indicating how there is very high value in the 5 core relationships but subsequent relationships further out will have significantly decreasing intensity.    [AND ALOT LESS VALUE!!!!]