Exercises — Chapter 20: Friendship, Social Networks,...

These exercises range from network analysis to practical action. The goal is not to produce a perfect social life but to understand your current situation clearly enough to make intentional choices about it.

Part 1: Mapping Your Current Network

Draw your current social network, organized roughly by Dunbar's layers:

Inner circle (up to 5): People you would call first in a crisis; who know you most deeply; whose wellbeing you actively monitor.

Sympathy group (up to 15): Close friends and family; people you see or speak with regularly; whose lives you feel genuinely invested in.

Trust network (up to 50): Good friends and trusted acquaintances; people you could call on for help; who you interact with fairly often.

Active network (up to 150): Acquaintances and colleagues; people you recognize and maintain some contact with.

(a) Where are the gaps? Which layers are thinner than you would want?

(b) How has the map changed over the last five years? What has been gained; what has been lost?

(c) Who in your network serves each of the five friendship functions (companionship, emotional support, informational support, appraisal/feedback, social identity)? Which functions are underserved?

Exercise 20.2 — The Quality Assessment

For each person in your inner circle and sympathy group:

(a) How well does this person actually know you — not just your history, but your current life, your current concerns, your current version of yourself?

(b) How current is your knowledge of their inner life?

(c) Is this relationship moving — continuing to deepen — or has it reached a ceiling? If it has stalled, what has it stalled around?

Part 2: Friendship Formation and History

Exercise 20.3 — How Your Closest Friendships Formed

Think about the two or three friendships you most value.

(a) How did each begin? What was the structural context that provided repeated contact?

(b) What was the first moment of genuine disclosure — the first conversation that moved from acquaintance-level to something deeper? What made it possible?

(c) Looking back: was there a point at which the friendship could have stalled — where the transition from acquaintance to friend required someone to take a risk? Who took the risk? What was the risk?

Exercise 20.4 — Friendship Transitions

Adult friendship often requires navigating transitional periods in which existing friendships become strained by developmental divergence.

(a) Think of a friendship that has diminished or ended not because of conflict but because your lives diverged significantly. What was the nature of the divergence?

(b) Are there friendships you have maintained primarily out of historical loyalty rather than current resonance — friendships that are sustained by the past rather than the present? What would honest assessment of these relationships produce?

(c) Are there people you would like to get to know better who represent your current life and values — who you might build new friendships with — but with whom you haven't yet made the transition from acquaintance?

Part 3: The Obstacles to Friendship

Exercise 20.5 — The Time Analysis

The chapter identifies time competition as the primary structural obstacle to adult friendship.

Examine your last two weeks.

(a) How many hours did you spend in activities that could reasonably be classified as friendship maintenance (not counting time with a partner or family)? Be specific and honest.

(b) How many hours did you spend in activities that substitute for friendship without providing its benefits — passive social media consumption, television, other solo activities?

(c) If you shifted one hour per week from the category in (b) to the category in (a), what would that look like concretely?

Exercise 20.6 — The Initiation Obstacle

Epley's research found that people consistently underestimate how much others want to be approached and overestimate the awkwardness of initiation.

(a) Think of three people in your current context (not close friends, but acquaintances or colleagues) with whom you would like to deepen the connection. Name them specifically.

(b) For each: what specifically prevents you from initiating? Name the obstacle as precisely as possible. Is it a logistics obstacle, a perceived awkwardness obstacle, or an underlying belief obstacle ("they wouldn't be interested," "I'm not good at this")?

(c) For one of the three: what is the smallest possible initiation action you could take this week? Not "we should have coffee" as a vague intention, but a specific message, invitation, or gesture.

Exercise 20.7 — The Vulnerability Inventory

Friendship deepens through reciprocal disclosure — which requires one person to take the first risk.

(a) In your current friendships, are you typically the one who discloses more, the one who discloses less, or roughly equal? What does this pattern produce?

(b) Is there a friendship that has been stuck at a certain depth for a long time — where the relationship is warm but not moving? What would it look like to take one step toward a deeper layer of disclosure in that friendship?

(c) What specifically makes vulnerability in friendship feel risky to you? Is the risk about the particular person, about friendship in general, or about something in your history of being known?

Part 4: Loneliness and Connection Quality

Exercise 20.8 — The Loneliness Assessment

Loneliness is the subjective experience of insufficient quality connection — not simply being alone.

Rate each of the following (1 = not at all; 5 = very much):

I feel that people around me don't really know me.
I feel left out of things in my social circle.
I have people I can call when something goes wrong.
My relationships feel somewhat superficial.
I feel genuinely connected to people in my daily life.
I have people I can be completely honest with.
I feel like a meaningful part of at least one community.

(a) What pattern do your ratings describe? Where is the specific gap — in depth of connection, in frequency of contact, in number of people, in community membership?

(b) If your loneliness is primarily around depth (few people really know you): what is one relationship in which you could take a step toward greater depth this week?

(c) If your loneliness is primarily around belonging (no community in which you feel you matter): what is one context — an organization, activity, or community — that you could engage with more consistently?

Exercise 20.9 — Parasocial Connection Audit

Parasocial connections — one-sided emotional relationships with media figures — can feel like connection while providing very little of what genuine friendship provides.

(a) How much time do you spend consuming content that involves parasocial engagement — podcasts, YouTube channels, social media accounts, television shows — where you feel emotionally connected to people who don't know you?

(b) Is any of this time that could be invested in actual social connection? What would happen if you replaced some of it?

(c) This is not an argument that parasocial connection is worthless — it can provide companionship and even inspiration. The question is whether it is functioning as a substitute for the real thing, and at what cost.

Part 5: Belonging

Exercise 20.10 — Belonging vs. Fitting In

Brown's distinction: belonging = being accepted as yourself; fitting in = changing yourself to be accepted.

(a) Where in your social life do you genuinely belong — are accepted as yourself, with no significant suppression of authentic aspects of your identity?

(b) Where in your social life do you primarily fit in — adapt, conceal, or perform in order to be accepted? What are the costs of this?

(c) Are there aspects of yourself that you have not brought into any social context — qualities, interests, experiences, or identities that you keep private because you don't know whether they would be received? Is there a context in which bringing these might produce genuine belonging?

Exercise 20.11 — Community Belonging

Belonging research suggests that dyadic friendships alone are not sufficient — community membership provides a distinct form of belonging that close friendship cannot fully substitute.

(a) Are you a meaningful member of any community — organization, neighborhood, faith community, professional community, activity group — that you didn't choose primarily for instrumental reasons (networking, achievement) but for genuine participation?

(b) If not: what communities have you been drawn to but haven't committed to? What has prevented commitment?

(c) If you were to join one community in the next three months, which would it be, and what would "commitment" mean in practice for that community?

Part 6: Building and Rebuilding

Exercise 20.12 — The Structure Audit

The chapter argues that adult friendship formation requires structures that provide repeated, contextual contact.

(a) What structures in your current life provide repeated contact with the same people over time? (Work, existing friendships, regular activities, etc.)

(b) What structures have you been considering adding — classes, clubs, organizations, regular activities — but haven't? What has prevented adding them?

(c) If you were to add one structure in the next month specifically designed to create new social contact, what would it be? Choose one that: (1) genuinely interests you, (2) involves regular participation, and (3) brings you into contact with new people repeatedly.

Exercise 20.13 — The Maintenance Plan

The chapter describes five friendship maintenance behaviors: positivity, openness, assurance, social networking, shared tasks.

(a) For your three closest friendships, rate how consistently you practice each behavior (1–5).

(b) Which maintenance behavior is most neglected across your friendships? What specifically would practicing it more look like?

(c) Is there a friendship that has been drifting — where contact has become less frequent and the reconnection feels increasingly weighted by the accumulated distance? What would it take to re-initiate? When specifically will you do it?

Part 7: Integration

Exercise 20.14 — The Five-Year Vision

Imagine your social life five years from now, in the version that would make you most satisfied.

(a) Describe it specifically: Who is in your inner circle? What kinds of community membership are you part of? How is your time socially distributed?

(b) What is the gap between the current state (Exercise 20.1) and the five-year vision?

Exercise 20.15 — The "I Was Thinking About You" Practice

Research on friendship maintenance consistently finds that expressing "I was thinking about you" — not when it's obligatory, but when it's genuinely true — is one of the highest-return friendship maintenance acts available.

For one week:

(a) When you think about a friend — when a news story, a product, a memory, a problem reminds you of them — send them a note. Not a text requiring response; just the thought, sent.

(b) Track how often this happens naturally. Track the responses.

(c) At the end of the week: what did you notice about the frequency with which others actually come to mind? And about the effect of sending the thought when it arose rather than filing it under "should reach out"?

The next chapter examines empathy and compassion — the psychological foundations of the social capabilities this chapter has been building toward.

Exercises — Chapter 20: Friendship, Social Networks, and Belonging