Find yourself, then find the others

#campcrafting 002: A primer on getting a social fitness physical, identifying your partners, and strengthening relationships

Find the others.

~Douglas Rushkoff

1. Find yourself

I liken this part of #campcrafting to the moment in the Roleplaying Game (RPG) where you unlock new characters, with unique skills and powers, to join you on your quest. This mission is no small task, and the challenges are many, but in this article I hope to provide a basic tool kit to help along the journey. First, and of utmost importance before setting off in search of your adventuring party, you need to know your own stats. As many of us have experienced in the anguishing case of unrequited love, just because you want to be with someone doesn’t mean they want to be with you. This can also apply to finding members for your camp — just because you want someone to be in your party doesn’t mean they want to be in your party. The first thing you need to do is figure yourself out a bit, assess your personality traits and social fitness. With this in hand, you’ll be better situated to find the others that synergize with your stats in a way that ensures greater success along the quest. 

Let’s begin by taking a social support physical (or QR code below):

This is a short (scientifically validated)¹ survey which I have adapted to give you a quick social fitness checkup. You’ll get a sum of the scores after completing the survey. This is your social fitness score. What then is your social health?

The social support survey average is 36, with the typical person landing within a range of 28.5 and the max (40). A score above 30 is considered a good level of social support.

I went ahead and coded a boxplot of the scientifically validated survey results from thousands of study participants to give you a bar to measure yourself against. The top of the box is the average score (noted on the Y-axis), and the orange bar is one standard deviation from the mean. In simpler terms, it tells you how much the data varies from the average. The larger the standard deviation, the more spread out the data is from the mean, and the smaller the standard deviation, the more closely the data is clustered around the mean.

For our purposes, a score above 30 means your social fitness is healthy. For those who are above average, if you were at the doctor’s office, they’d say you were in good shape. If below average, they may give you some references on how to improve your diet, increase exercise, and reduce stress. If the score is below twenty-five, the doctor may prescribe you some medication and refer you to a specialist. If you happen to score a perfect 40 the doctor may recruit you for scientific studies to better understand your Olympian social health. For most of us though, just because you’re in decent shape doesn’t mean you can’t strive to live an even healthier lifestyle! 

In 2016 when I had reached a peak of extrinsic success at the cost of my intrinsic health, I took this survey and, with a score of 14, was diagnosed with a serious case of social diabetes. I was in bad shape.

Continuing on that path, like with any chronic illness, I would have likely needed some emergency care in my middle age. I took action, and began the #campcrafting quest soon after. It’s been a long, hard, disciplined road since, but my social fitness workout regime has paid off. In 2022 I took a reevaluation, and I scored 39/40. This is the equivalent from going from a hypertensive, avid smoker, and obese BMI of 30 couch-potato — to a lithe, athletic, smoke free athlete with a BMI of 20 — all in about five years. Challenging, but totally doable with the right incentives and state of mind.

2. Find the others

Now let’s take a look at the raw materials of your social network. The first thing we do is conjure up the people who mean the most to you. This shortlist of emotionally significant relationships that is called a sympathy group.

A sympathy group is the list of people for whom you would be emotionally devastated by their death, typically averaging twelve individuals.

At first glance this can seem like a challenging task, as even the most introverted among us have rather extended social networks; just consider your Facebook (insert social media network here) friends list. As we’ll see, the list is often shorter than we expect. We will use an unfortunately morbid thought experiment to stress test and flag your crucially important relationships:

If you found out today that someone you know died would it be emotionally devastating? 

Really, deeply, heart wrenchingly envision the people you know the best in the world perishing forever. Which among them hits you in your emotional core. Before you go on feeling guilty for not being devastated at the imagining of each person's death, as a scientist I assuage you of all guilt. Preciousness is an evolved, adaptive trait. If everyone was precious, nothing would be precious (reductio ad absurdum), and you would have no adaptive way of distributing energy in your social environment. That’s actually deadly. 

The following survey is another kind of measure of social health (also scientifically validated)² which can help you get at different dimensions your own network. You can get out a piece of paper, excel spreadsheet, or take this this survey by answering these prompts (note: best to use initials of the person for anonymity):

• List the number of individuals whom you contact at least once a month

• List those persons whose death would cause you anguish

• List the number of individuals that you would reach out to in case of a crisis

• Sum the number of individuals in each list

The most important query in this moment is the following: List those persons whose death would cause you anguish.

The average person’s list is twelve to fifteen people long³ (my list happens to be fourteen)… Intriguingly, there were some surprises on it when I really dug deep to perform this emotionally challenging exercise. It was difficult, but this knowledge is true social power. Good job for getting through it!

Now you’ve got an important social tool within your grasp as the Principle of Intentional Proximity dictates that you would likely increase wellness by devoting more energy, in general, to these people than any others on the planet — because when they go, you’ll likely regret not having spent more time with them. It’s a good social NorthStar that can guide future decisions about where to take jobs, locate your family, and or camp, or otherwise spend your finite, invaluable time.

3. The social short list 

With the list crafted from the previous section, you can execute the most important assessment — nominations for your Honor group.

An honor group the short list of strongest social network ties from your sympathy group.

The typical person has only a small number of really strong social ties. In the social sciences they are called confidants. These are your best friends and your life’s insurance policy. The number varies only a little. On average, people have 4.4 confidants⁴ (with a range of 2.6 and 6.2). The following diagnostic will help you crystalize the shortlist of your strongest relationships. As was the case for me, you may already intuitively feel like you know who these people are. Yet, it was extremely valuable running this for myself and also brought to the conscious level some surprising realizations about my most (and least!) emotionally valuable relationships. Using the same survey you took above where you recorded initials of your support group, consider the following question you’ve already answered: 

List the number of individuals you would reach out to for help in the case of a crisis

Psychologists call this a support group; I call this list of life partners a Fireteam but you and your people can call it whatever you want. In sum, this is your life partner's roster — your “ride or die” crew. If you have a list of 4-7 then you’re in good shape. If it’s less than 4, then you’d likely benefit from getting out there and finding friends and forging bonds. If you’re such a socialite that you have more than seven, another exercise may help. 

Note that, for those who are more visually inclined, a supplementary (or alternative qualitative) exercise is to draw out two circles, one representing you as the self, and the other representing the individuals on your sympathy list. This is scientifically validated and called Other in the Self (IOS) Scale.⁵ You can rank relationships in terms of their proximity and overlap (see figure below). 

To weigh the perceived emotional and spiritual importance to your relationships, draw out a self-other pairing for each relationship on the sympathy list. Viola! You now have a weighted ranking of your social support network, and the 4-7 closest circles on this list should be the focus of your intentions in building stronger, more salient bonds.

4. Groups in focus - a summary

We’ll talk about psychological profiles in the next article but introversion-extroversion comes into play here, as the more extroverted among us may have a greater appetite and social energy to distribute in networks. These individuals can play around with honor groups on the upper bounds approaching five to six partners whereas introverted individuals may only be able to handle two to three partners. 

Sure, having more friends is good as it drives improvements in health — but there is a tradeoff between the degree and closeness of social contacts: as the number of close social contacts increases, the average closeness of each individual contact decreases. In other words, more friends equals cheaper quality relationships. At the end of the day, there’s only so much love to spread around. That’s why there is a sweet-spot to the number of people in your Honor Group. Again, these people should be among those you consider would exhibit the greatest level of honor and loyalty to you and to others in your hypothetical group. 

Now we’ve got a better understanding of our own social fitness, a sympathy group, and a potential honor group. Go out and spend time with these people. Talk to them about your vision for a future where you’re more interconnected. Pitch them the #campcrafting concept, its potential benefits and possible pitfalls. Share the link to this article:

(Shameless pitch coming). Maybe even direct them to OUR TRIBAL FUTURE: How to Channel our Foundational Human Instincts Into a Force for Good and point them to the chapter titled “Tribal Benefits.” Some will dig, some may have their curiosity peaked, and others will pass, but at the end of the exercise you’ll have a much clearer picture of yourself and the adventuring party of your life. With a crew in hand, now the real fun begins.

Much of campcrafting however, is when you combine all the spells ingredients together and cast it — does it fizzle or does it make magic? What underpins the success of a group is what social scientists call cohesion. Cohesion is determined by the personality makeup of a team. Camps that have an awareness of the personality makeup of the individuals within their group have a decisive advantage in how they manage their groups to increase the odds of attaining their goals. We’ll get a sense of how to cast this high level Wizard’s spell this in the next article.

References

1. Orpana, Heather M., Justin J. Lang, and Kim Yurkowski. "Original quantitative research-validation of a brief version of the Social Provisions Scale using Canadian national survey data." Health Promotion and Chronic Disease Prevention in Canada: Research, Policy and Practice 39.12 (2019): 323.

2. Buys, Christian J., and Kenneth L. Larson. "Human sympathy groups." Psychological Reports 45.2 (1979): 547-553.

3. Stiller, James, and Robin IM Dunbar. "Perspective-taking and memory capacity predict social network size." Social Networks 29.1 (2007): 93-104.

4. Hill, Russell A., and Robin IM Dunbar. "Social network size in humans." Human nature 14.1 (2003): 53-72.

5. Aron, Arthur, Elaine N. Aron, and Danny Smollan. "Inclusion of other in the self scale and the structure of interpersonal closeness." Journal of personality and social psychology 63.4 (1992): 596.