2022-10-14

• Recently been thinking about the concept of “heartbeats” in relationships. It seems like, for me, intimate relationships have historically involved a consistent, “heartbeat” of some sort of social interaction. Growing up, you’d have many things you could label as heartbeats. With family, the first one that comes to mind is family dinner. With friends, it would be something like time spent playing sports together. As I got older, the structure of life changed, and some relationships had heartbeats that evolved with that changing structure and others have not. For my family, we have a weekly phone call home. For friends, it usually revolves around texts or phone calls or gathering for some shared interest. Work relationships have a professional heartbeat in the form of meetings. One thing that is interesting is looking at how close relationships ebb/flow and thinking about a correlation with the existence or lack thereof of a heartbeat. This isn’t a hardcore stats exercise, it’s anecdotal, but the correlation seems high. This makes me wonder if we could posit a “heartbeat theory” of intimate relationships: all serious relationships need some sort of heartbeat. Interesting to think through counter examples and implications.
  • open questions
    
  • do all intimate relationships/close groups have some sort of social heartbeat?
    
  • what are good ways to navigate changing heartbeats?
    
• Reading an interesting book from Venkatesh Rao again. Well, it’s really a series of blogs. The first one talks about the relationship between group sizes and creative output. The big idea is that a group of 12 similarly skilled individuals will lead to a creative environment that maximizes the potential of each member. Interesting to think about which creative endeavors I have and what groups support them in this context. Definitely don’t achieve anything close to 12 outside of a work context. Also interesting that I’m not sure what the best tools would be to coordinate building and maintaining such a group online. Discord seems popular now. Maybe Twitter. Blogs seem like the default solution 20 years ago, but woefully underpowered now.

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