Back when me and Peaches planned to be big shot Hollywood movie writers I read an interview with Quentin Tarantino where he explained why he thought it was important for him to live in Los Angeles. “Even if I come in last, I’m still running with the big dogs,” he said. Or something like that.
When it’s been inconvenient for me to believe this I’ve made all kinds of justifications about why it isn’t true. But the rest of the time, I’m fully on-board with the idea that your social groups will determine who you are. It would be a fun experiment to go all the way with this – imagine that, instead of introducing you to my friend Swanky, I just took you around to all the groups of which he is a part. Took you to where he works, the bars he drinks in, to meet the people he hangs out with. I have no doubt you’d have a pretty decent idea of what he’s about, without ever meeting him or asking anyone anything about him.
Swanky would be an extreme example because he lives such a broad and socially connected life; but I can even imagine this being true for other people, who instead of having, say, twenty principal social components to their social groupings, have only two or three. In that case, the theory goes, they would be far more heavily defined by each particular social grouping, since there’s so few of them. Which would make each one really important. If you only have two friends, you’re going to be defined by those two people. Scary. Or maybe wonderful, depending on the people.
Anyway, I’d read journal abstracts of this research with regard to physical components like obesity and longevity, but now it’s in the popular press:
The data exposed not only the contagious nature of obesity but the power of social networks to influence individual behavior. This effect extends over great distances—a fact revealed by tracking original subjects who moved away from Framingham. “Your friends who live far away have just as big an impact on your behavior as friends who live next door,” Fowler says. “Think about it this way: Even if you see a friend only once a year, that friend will still change your sense of what’s appropriate. And that new norm will influence what you do.” An obese sibling hundreds of miles away can cause us to eat more. The individual is a romantic myth; indeed, no man is an island.
From Wired.
When you think about this stuff it makes you swallow hard and ask yourself: are the people I surround myself with the kind of people I want to become? Because you will. You are. We all are, turning into the people we spend our time with. Hopefully it’s a transformation to be proud of.