The size of a tribe

It is my understanding that generally people are wired up to be able to cope with social interactions between a group of 150 people. It���s an average, and like all averages there will be people to whom, one way or another and for whatever reasons, it does not apply. It is however a place to start from. How many people do you regularly deal with, through work, neighbourhood, family, social engagements… because of course back when we were tribal peoples, there wasn���t this weird distinction between different interactions with different groups of people in the same way. Pre-industrial revolution in fact, we peasants played, reproduced, worked and struggled alongside our neighbours. Pre-cars most of us had more connectivity to the people around us.

And then there���s internet. It is both a blessing and a curse in terms of the scope for breadth and depth of interaction. I���m married to a man I met online and some of my closest relationships depend to at least some degree on maintenance by ether, but there���s a lot of you out there.

Some weeks ago now, I had a meltdown. It happens. I was exhausted and I���d just had a run of messing up. I���d massively annoyed someone, and couldn���t work out if I needed to feel responsible over that. I���d forgotten an important historical detail while dealing with someone I care about. I panicked. In the process of stepping away from that and looking at what had happened, I realised a thing: I���m dealing with a lot of people.

In a normal week, I will interact with hundreds of different people. Local people, authors, random people on social media, friends, people I���ve run into somewhere, business contacts, bloggers, and so on and so forth. For that to work I have to remember who they are and what we have in common and what we talked about last time and what their issues are and who they don���t get on with and what offends them and all the other things.

Now, it���s possible to do this well with a handful of close connections. Trying to hold that level of detail and information-intimacy with truly hundreds of people some of whom I seldom communicate with… that���s tough. There are things about how I work and what I do that make it necessary, or at least useful, and when I can pull it off, this ability to handle a ���tribe��� of excessive proportions certainly has its advantages, but what I realised is that I need to cut myself some slack if I can���t remember a conversation from a year ago, or if I make a mistake and someone is offended by that.

I can���t magically know everything, and that���s pointed to some much bigger issues. I���ve been places where I���ve been expected to magically know things I had no way of knowing, and been punished for failing to be psychic enough. I don���t have to carry on doing that to myself in the hopes of staying ahead of people who would otherwise cheerfully hurt me. What I need to do instead is have less to do with anyone who demands perfection of me, be more alert to unreasonable demands (mine and other people���s) and recognise that I actually have a really good memory for people related stuff, but I frequently push beyond its limits. I have to stop trying to be omniscient, it���s exhausting as well as being entirely beyond me.