Imagine yourself as a star.
Imagine all of your friends as other celestial bodies in your orbit. Planets, comets, moons. Clouds of stellar dust. Asteroid belts. Hell, I can easily imagine one or two friends as supermassive black holes.
The pattern of your friends and all of their interconnected relationships, represented by orbiting celestial bodies with you at the center, together would form your social solar system.
The solar system would have clusters of celestial bodies: groups of friends that know each other or are bound by common interests, locations, or organizations. You could imagine these clusters as moons orbiting a planet orbiting you, the host star.
Assuming interstellar travel was feasible, there would exist critical outposts that connect different regions of your solar system. Trade hubs. Refueling stations. Crossroads in space. These figurative bridges would span the gap between clusters of friends. They represent the high social capital people that somehow seem to know everyone (in my mind, I’m thinking of my twin sister or my friend Dan Nestor).
Naturally, your solar system’s clusters will have some overlap; perhaps a friend from high school ends up moving to New York and meeting a bunch of the people you went to college with who also moved there. Perhaps someone you meet climbing also happens to take classes your pottery studio. We all exist on the same orbital plane, after all.
The impacts of time and entropy cause friendships to wax and wane. People take up different lifestyles; friends move to new cities; partners get together or break up. In space, planetary migration or the effect of gravitational forces can lead to slow drifts apart, like how the Moon is inching away from Earth. Sometimes, unlikely as it may be in the vastness of space, celestial bodies do collide. Dramatic cosmic events can move people into new orbits, closer or further from you.
Imagining the folks you know, think about the people on the fringes. In our solar system, it’s the Kuiper Belt: Pluto and the other dwarf planets, far from the terrestrial planets of the solar system’s inner core that represent your closest friends. The unexplored, unmapped, unknown.
The outer limits of our friendship systems offer opportunities for discovery. Perhaps you used to spend a lot of time with these folks but lost touch, or maybe you’ve only met them in passing. Either way, they know people you don’t know, and you know lots of people they don’t know. As I’ve said before, friendships compound, and you can never be sure what you might stumble across when surveying the uncharted.
The last year I’ve spent a lot more time on the edges of my system, discovering new planets and bringing new bodies into my orbit. After all, high-density days tend to cause spontaneous gravitational capture.
This astronomy metaphor has been relatively parochial, just focusing on our solar system and Sun. But beyond our solar system is a galaxy, and beyond our Milky Way there are hundreds of billions of galaxies in the known universe. Likewise, beyond our solar system of friendships exists a whole universe. I’m excited to see what else is out there.
Alright, that’s enough of this metaphor. I need some space from it.
You exist in a nearby galaxy, for me, and I know you only through little morse gatherings every few weeks.. but this post is another proof of how much we think alike. it's a complex but nice metaphor, kudos to you for throwing some jetfuel at it. and absolutely beautiful photo, s/o Dorothy.