Who are the people in your neighborhood?

A half-ass experiment in community and sociability

I’m just going to confess that as a kid, I had a complicated relationship with Mr. Rogers. On the one hand, I can still sing, “You Can Never Go Down the Drain,” a song reassuring kids (like me) that it was impossible to get sucked down the bathtub drain. This song was VERY IMPORTANT to me.

On the other hand, the puppets scared the shit out of me. If you don’t know what I’m talking about, then you don’t know, and I’m not going to subject you to a picture of them, but goddam, King Friday and Lady Elaine Fairchilde are the stuff of nightmares and Daniel Striped Tiger was a whiny little creep.¹  The trolley, though? That was awesome. Also, Mr. Rogers’ shoes were pretty cool.

Oh, yeah, look at that trolley.

I don’t know if Mr. Rogers would approve of this little experiment I conducted last week or not. I think he would. I do know that as I was doing it, I couldn’t stop singing, “These are the people in your neighborhood,” which my husband, who is old enough to have missed the whole Mr. Rogers thing, probably thought was a little weird.

Last week was (finally, for fuck’s sake) our spring break. One week between when the regular winter semester ends and the every-day, month long, spring term begins. I don’t want to talk about how much of a break that IS NOT. Let’s just all accept it’s bullshit and move on.

During this break, I decided I’d keep track of how many people I see and/or talk to in  a day. Specifically, people I know. This as close to original social science research as I hope to ever come again before I die.

Methods

‘Seeing,’ for the purposes of this study, includes someone I wave to across the street as well people I meet for lunch or who come over to our house.

Let me state at the beginning that this week was not a representative sample. The week in question was late April and while not the warmest of weeks, the sun was mostly shining and the weather was tolerable, except for Friday, which sucked. Also, because I was not teaching, I spent a lot of time wandering around the streets of downtown Madison. Even when I am teaching, I spend a lot of time wandering around the streets of Madison, but last week, even more than usual. ‘People I know’ included anyone whose name I know and have conversed with at least once.² Jeff, my husband, did not count. Neither did the cats. The men working on fixing the large pit under our front porch did. You’d better believe that at this point, I know them.

Do I know more people than average, you might ask? I have no idea. I know less people than Randy Lakeman, because everyone knows fewer people in Madison than Randy. I know more, I suspect, than most other professors at the college, especially if they don’t live downtown.

Results

Here are the results in a very scientific sort of chart:

Monday: 10

Tuesday: 11

Wednesday: 17

Thursday: over 30 (I went to the grand opening of The Chandler Hotel, which is awesome, and everyone who is everyone who was there, so I lost count, but it was at least over 30)

Friday: 13

Discussion

This was sort of hard as experiments go, mostly because it was difficult to keep track. I maybe should have bought one of those clicker things, but that still might not have worked. Saying hello to Jess and Melissa at the library is so second nature that it only occurred to me the next day to add them to the total. Sometimes I would write out my list for the day then go on my evening walk and see three more people. I suck at data collection. This is not a surprise to me.

It’s not shocking to find that you can really pad your numbers by sitting in a coffee shop for an hour or so. Or going to an event that you know everyone in town is really excited about, like the open house for a fancy new boutique hotel.

Because I am obsessed with community and relationships and how they connect to living a good life³, it’s also not surprising to me that I felt considerably happier and more upbeat this week as I saw a lot of people.

It’s not just me, of course. As I’ve been reading in The Good Life: Lessons from the World’s Longest Scientific Study of Happiness, other people make us happy. We don’t believe they do because we’re not very good at figuring out or predicting what will make us happy. But they do. Saying hello to people gives me a warm fuzzy not that different from the sensation I get biting into a very good bagel (I’d say cookie if I was a cookie person, but you get the idea).

Hanging out with my husband or daughter or siblings or very good friends makes me happy, but don’t underestimate the power of what sociologists call weak ties—the people you don’t really know so well. Studies show that people with a high degree of social integration—people who have a lot of strong and weak ties—tend to be healthier and happier.

Another word for those fleeting interactions is sociability, which is a fancy word for hanging out. Or shooting the shit. Sociability is interaction that has no other purpose than the pure joy of interaction. You’re not trying to get to know someone on a date. You’re not trying to help someone learn how to write a literature review (the horror). You’re not doing whatever the purpose of the interacting people do in business meetings is, which is a real mystery to me.

Call it sociability or weak ties, either way, it’s good to know the people in your neighborhood (though if they have creepy puppets, STAY AWAY!).

Further research

Okay, here’s the real agenda. I suspect that my daily totals for people I see are probably higher than the average American. First, most people have to, you know, work from 9-5 (sorry, Eli, though you ‘see’ a lot of more people out of your upstairs window, just saying), so they don’t have time to wander around their small downtown. Also, very few people have a small downtown to wander around in. Madison, my friends, is a freak of a place! A town of about 12,000 people with a downtown so vibrant that I can do a LOT OF THINGS over the course of a week and never have to move my car! In fact, I did not use my car at all last week until I drove to my parent’s house on Saturday. That’s insane! That’s unicorn-level rare!

So my life is not the average life. But it might be on the low end for other Madisonians (looking at you, Randy). And I didn’t grow up here (I’m not from Madison), so I know a lot less people than folks who are natives.

As previously stated, I’m never going to conduct actual social science research to find out how many people an average American sees on a daily basis. Also too lazy to look it up.⁴

So let’s do this the fun and messy way! Do your own experiment! Keep your own count and tell me your numbers! Or if, like me, it all sounds like a lot of work, just guess. Or, I don’t know, make it up? How many people do you see on a daily basis, and, no, texting and zooming and facetiming don’t count.

1. Like, my god, did anyone ever wash Daniel? He looked like a stuffed animal from the 1930s. Was he? What was their budget on that show, for fuck’s sake?

2. I decided not to include what I might call ‘characters’ or ‘acquaintances.’ So, no to the guy who runs the fabric store and wears the quilt. Also no to the woman who walks the pug and seemed to, for a period of time, specifically encourage the dog to poop in the churchyard next door. But yes to Vern, because everyone knows Vern.

3. I would say that even I’m sick of hearing me talk about this stuff, but, friends, I’m not. I could still go on and on. I want people to feel better. Other people are part of how you feel better. It’s just that simple, for fuck’s sake.

4. I also suspect this statistic would be very hard to find as no one keeps track of it because we Americans think things like seeing other human beings is so much less important than, well, really, everything else.