Book
How Many Friends Does One Person Need?
Robin Dunbar
Dunbar's layered circles explain why the number of people you can genuinely keep up with is small, and why guilt about the rest is misplaced.
Tool 33 · Develop yourself
Who would notice if I disappeared for a week?
Not an audit of how popular you are. A small network is not a fault, and a large one is not an achievement.
A guided 16 to 20 minute conversation using ChatGPT. Free, no account, nothing to sign up to.
01
Copy
Take the TAIU prompt.
02
Paste
Open ChatGPT.
03
Talk
One question at a time.
Copies the TAIU prompt. Paste it into ChatGPT.
You don't need ChatGPT Plus. The free version is fine.
Who knows what is actually happening in your life right now?
Not who cares about you. Who knows. It is a shorter list and it is the one that matters.
Being the person everybody relies on is not the same as being supported.
What you'll explore
- 01Recent contact
- 02Who you told
- 03Direction of traffic
- 04Dormant relationships
A note from Mark
The interesting question is not how many people you know. It is who knows what is currently going on with you. Those are usually two very different lists and the second one is often shorter than people expect.
The other thing worth watching is direction. Some people are not short of relationships at all. They are short of relationships in which anybody asks them anything. That is a specific problem and it does not get solved by meeting more people.
I would also be careful about the word dormant. Most friendships that have gone quiet have not ended. They have simply had nobody go first for a while, and going first costs less than people imagine.
Read my full view ↓
And if the map comes out small and solid, that is a good result. It is not the answer people expect, but it is often the true one.
What you'll get
You won't finish with a personality type.You'll leave with answers you can actually test.
01
The real map
02
Who knows the present
03
One way traffic
04
What is dormant
+
Your TAIU handover — a portable summary of everything the conversation established.
See everything included ↓
- 01What you came here with
- 02Who is actually there
- 03Who knows what is happening in your life
- 04Where the traffic runs one way
- 05What the list does not contain
- 06What you contribute
- 07What is being neglected
- 08The rival reading
- 09What deserves protecting
- 10The credible alternative
- 11What, if anything, this asks of you
- 12What remains unresolved
- 13Where this goes next
What now?
01 · Save it
A map of who is actually there, built from behaviour.
02 · Test it
Answer the message you have left for eleven days.
Explore this further ↓
What I would do
- 01
Work from what people do rather than from how long you have known them.
- 02
Look at the traffic in both directions. Being everybody's support is a finding too.
- 03
Separate the people who know your history from the people who know your present.
- 04
Notice what the existing network already does well before deciding it is insufficient.
- 05
Count dormant relationships properly. Most are not over.
Test it
- 01
Who would you call at eleven at night, and would they answer?
- 02
Who knows what has been occupying you this month?
- 03
Which name did you avoid mentioning during this exercise?
The alternative
The expected conclusion is that the network is too small. Sometimes the evidence points the other way. The network may be perfectly adequate and undervalued, with three people who would turn up at short notice being read as not enough because a feed suggests otherwise. Sometimes the problem is not scarcity but direction: somebody surrounded by people who all need something from them. And sometimes what looks like a shrinking circle is a normal consequence of getting older and choosing fewer, closer relationships on purpose.
Think about this
- Who you told first about the last significant thing.
- Who has asked you an unprompted question this month.
- Which relationships you initiate every time.
- Who relies on you, and what that costs.
- The friendships that stopped without anybody ending them.
Take this to Ask Mark
You've done the exercise. Now challenge what came back.
Interpretation, not another copy-and-paste exercise.
Take this to Ask Mark →Finished the exercise?
What did this uncover?
Tell us whether it helped and what you discovered. It takes less than a minute.
Next tool
Am I lonely
If the map is populated and something is still missing
Further thinking
How Many Friends Does One Person Need?
Robin Dunbar
The Strength of Weak Ties
Mark Granovetter
The Good Life
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
Explore the thinking ↓
Article
The Strength of Weak Ties
Mark Granovetter
Granovetter's paper is the reason acquaintances matter more than they feel like they should. Useful when a life looks thin but is actually broad and shallow.
Book
The Good Life
Robert Waldinger & Marc Schulz
The Harvard Study of Adult Development has followed lives across decades. One of its clearest lessons is that the quality of our relationships matters enormously to how our lives unfold.
Book
Bowling Alone
Robert Putnam
Putnam's account of the decline of associational life is contested and largely American, and it still changes how you count your own contribution. Membership, attendance and turning up repeatedly for something small are treated here as real civic goods rather than as lesser versions of writing a cheque.