How to Reset Friendships

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i worry that too much time has passed for my london friends and i to be able to reset our relationships. We learned from professor dumbar that as humans, we can successfully maintain around 150 friends. It feels like i never had a life that really looked like the one he describes here. Maybe i was just never normal to begin with. To find out, i took out the old coloring pencils and decided to plot my friends. Those friends fall into different layers depending on how close they so i want it to see where my friends fall. And if you like, you can try this along with me. Grabbing some paper and some covord pens, i am going to draw a

Time with friends just isn’t the same with a screen in between you. That’s a struggle many have faced recently, with half of Americans saying they’ve lost touch with at least one friend during the pandemic. It can be sad, but is falling out of touch with friends normal? How many relationships should we maintain, and what are the different kinds of friendships we need anyways? Evolutionary psychologist Robin Dunbar has been studying social relationships for 50 years, and he has answers. Data journalist Mona Chalabi maps out her own relationships against the averages, and invites us to do the same. This is an episode of Am I Normal? with Mona Chalabi, another podcast from the TED Audio Collective. You can find and follow it wherever you're listening to this. To learn more about "How to Be a Better Human," host Chris Duffy, or find footnotes and additional resources, please visit: go.ted.com/betterhuman