WHY | You're the average of much more than the 5 people you spend the most time with

[iteles]

One of the core motivations for building @home is creating a place where everyone can surround themselves with those people who are so hard to find - the learners, the doers, the eclectic mix of people who enrich our lives. We all know a few, but most of us know less than a handful.

So the tittle of this article intrigued me: 'You are NOT the average of the five people you surround yourself with'.

As it turn s out, this title is somewhat clickbait to tell you that you are in fact, not only the average of these 5 people but of your wider network. But more interestingly, the average of the people who are in the networks of the people you spend time with that you've never even met.

Daniel Burkus' 'Friend of a Friend: Understanding the Hidden Networks That Can Transform Your Life and Your Career' goes into more detail about this and is probably an interesting book to buy for @home!

Whilst a lot of the writing is about how friends of friends can affect your weight and habits like smoking, he quotes a study where if you friend of a friend of a friend is happy with their lives, you're 6% more likely to be happy with yours. By providing a place where people can continuously expand their groups of friends and acquaintances with like-minded, interesting people every time they come to stay (and eventually many places), this is perfectly aligned with our mission at dwyl of helping people maximise their happiness (and combatting loneliness #6).

There are only 2 reviews on Amazon UK for the book, but 87 on .com:

Task: Add words to this effect to the readme.

[nelsonic]

Being influenced by friends of friends is the best case for carefully cultivating one’s social network. As described in: nelsonic/nelsonic.github.io#521 (comment)

[iteles]

https://www.sapiens.org/evolution/microbiome-social-behavior/

Cliff notes

Bodies host a wealth of microorganisms, which scientists call the microbiome; [...] Every animal—from a bumblebee to a human being—has a microbiome, or, rather, several microbiomes. The digestive system, the skin, and other parts of the body host communities of microbes that together make up the gut microbiome, the skin microbiome, and so on.

Scientists had long assumed that the composition of the gut microbiome was largely determined by diet and environment, but the Amboseli samples revealed that a baboon’s social life is an important predictor of this microbiome.

Until quite recently, however, research on the connection between the microbiome and sociality focused on pathogens and infection

As for humans, we know that people who share a house also share microbial inhabitants [...] But [in a 2014 study of 7 families] Gilbert and his colleagues could not determine how much of this microbial overlap came down to shared environment, diet, genetics, or social interaction.

“That [https://elifesciences.org/articles/05224] was the first paper that laid it out pretty clearly that the amount of time you spend with somebody will determine how similar your microbiomes are [study of baboons],” biological anthropologist Katherine Amato of Northwestern University says. “And that generated a lot of excitement in terms of thinking about how microbes might be passed among individuals.”

The jury is still out on how and to what extent physical interactions with your peer group influence your microbiome. More research is under way.