The Economics of Friendship

     

So cute

       I know a lot of people who have a lot of friends. As a matter of fact, most people I know have more friends than I. I could go on forever with theories as to why this could be (mass political conspiracy, I presume) but this is no time to discuss sociology. Sometimes I think about my relative dearth of close friends and I feel some degree of sadness but most of the time I'm pretty okay with it. I've been thinking of reasons why that may be and what I came up with was a simile involving money.

       The reason why I think it's okay that I don't have quite as many friends as some of the social butterflies is the same reason why I think it's okay that I don't carry around many quarters and dimes. What I mean by this is: think about a dollar, not one paper dollar but the quantity of wealth defined by one dollar. One could argue that a dollar is a dollar no matter how it's split up but if you think about it, but is that really the case? Consider this: someone walks up to you on the street and hands you a dollar, that would be considerably more exciting than than if someone walks up to a friend of yours and hands him/her one hundred pennies. That doesn't make sense on a purely financial basis because your friend is technically just as wealthy as you now as far as dollar amount but now you have an extra dollar that weighs next to nothing, fits just about anywhere, can even be folded into a majestic swan if need be, and is just a very aesthetically pleasing shade of green. Meanwhile, your friend is also a dollar richer but now he/she has to carry around something to the effect of 100,000,000 pounds annoying composed mostly of zinc with only 2.5 percent copper which is lame in and of itself. A hundred pennies is not only heavy and composed mostly of an unattractive metal but is also nearly impossible to keep track of (a couple cents is bound to be lost) and if your friend can somehow figure out how to fold a penny into a swan, it immediately loses its value (paper dollars retain 100% of their value no matter how they are folded! Huzzah!). In other words, you are now happier than your friend even though you are the same dollar amount richer therefore it can be said that one hundred pennies is not equal in value to one paper dollar.
       Now let's expand this into a person's entire social network. Say, on average, people's social lives are worth $100 (of course, this is an arbitrary number and this analogy would work for any other dollar amount, it's just that 100 is a really easy number to work with). Some people have a social life that consists of one $100 friend which is a little bit sad because a $100 bill is difficult to work with because it is so big and valuable that it's almost too good for most situations and no one likes to give change for a hundred dollar bill on a fifteen dollar transaction. Other people have social lives that consist of one-hundred one dollar bills which is also kind of sad because that's difficult to keep track of and each individual friend isn't worth much and you probably wouldn't even be very sad if a couple happened to fall out of your pocket--you might not even notice! Furthermore, anyone who carries around that many ones is probably a stripper. As a side note: if your social life consists of 10,000 pennies, you are weird and you need to change something about your life post-haste. In conclusion, the value of a social life composed of five $20 bills or three tens, a fifty, and a twenty, etc. is greater than the value of a social life broken into very few very large bills or a ridiculous number of very small bills (or coins). Also, one who has a nice round social life composed of five twenties is not at all likely to give one of those $20 friends away unless they really believe it is for the best and that it will be beneficial to them in the end to do so. People love twenties. Twenties are awesome.