everyone knows everyone
aka a nonzero chance repeated a bit too often
I used to think of modern life as expansive. More people. More cities. More distance. I’m no longer convinced that’s true.
The first time I noticed otherwise was in high school in India.
A family we’d known since I was three when we lived in Seattle, moved back to the same city as us in India. People move.
Unrelatedly, I had a best friend in middle school, out of maybe 480 people. Years later, when I moved from that middle school to a completely different senior high school, coincidentally he did too. This was in a city with hundreds of schools, far enough away that there wasn’t any obvious geographic overlap. It helped to get a referral to get into this school which turns out we got from the same person - the family from Seattle. At the time, I tried to write this off as a localized coincidence.
Yeah...no.
When I moved to America for college I figured this would stop happening. Surely it couldn’t feel like everyone knew everyone if I didn’t know anyone. And for maybe a year, it didn’t. Then it started feeling like a small internet village. I was in North Carolina, but most of my close friends lived in cities and countries I’d never even been to. This felt like an online people happenings. Algorithms. Twitter. Discords. Surely this wasn’t actually real life.
Then I moved to the Bay. This one’s almost cheating, because I now don’t see how it ever could’ve been otherwise. But even then, it felt absurd. Everything and everyone was connected. To the point where I made it a personal goal to meet one truly net-new person: someone who didn’t know anyone I knew, and vice versa.
One summer during a shenanigan of semi-squatting at Stanford, I joined their Latin dance club. This is the kind of social dancing that involves changing partners every song. I really liked the club so I went every week. And found that I danced well with this one specific lead. So I told him that we should be ‘official’ dance partners and he said okay. That was probably the second or third full sentence we had spoken so needless to say I thought I achieved my goal. He was also a grad student at Stanford so what are the odds of knowing someone random who was probably not even close to my age. Later we decided to hangout because we’d become dance friends at this point but barely knew each other beyond that. This is at least a month in and in the first ten minutes of the conversation I learn that
he was in fact around my age
he knew someone I knew from my twitter high school social life
his girlfriend was friends with one of my friends and also friends with another friend’s roommate’s girlfriend.
At the time, I only knew three people at Stanford total.
In the Bay I did eventually make two genuinely net-new friends but only through intention, not chance. Tim, who works for the city of SF in urban planning, whom I met at BJJ. And Michael, who threw a Fourth of July party at the exact same place and time as one I was throwing. I was ready to fight. He suggested we merge instead. The result was a strange but wonderful mix of tech people, fratty Stanford grad students, and a lot of very good food, vibes, and stories.
Then there’s Switzerland. When I met S there, it really felt like we had no one in common. We were born in different countries, raised in different countries, went to school in different countries, and are of different ages. Clean slate. Or so I thought
His co-founder from London knew someone from my volunteering organization from high school in India. S now lives in America with someone whose lease I almost took over after meeting on Twitter. But I didn’t, because I ended up living at Stanford instead. That roommate also knows my close friend from India (not even the same city as me), who also knows the boyfriend of a girl who is friends with this close friend’s girlfriend.
At some point you stop trying to diagram it
I don’t know what this means exactly. I just know that no matter where I go, the world keeps feeling smaller than I expect it to be and that always blows my mind.
You’d think I’d be used to it by now.
But how could you ever be, when everyone knows everyone.