In the mid-nineties – a decade after it’s release – the soundtrack to The Big Chill was still slotted into the tape deck of every Volvo station wagon rattling toward pick-up. Joy to the World by Three Dog Night was a banger. The movie… not so much. A remarkably self-serious example of Boomer onanism, the film follows a group of college friends and Glenn Close’s perm as they reunite to bury a former classmate who committed suicide. It’s Chekhov for the people that popularized jogging. Still, the title, Lawrence Kasdan’s description of the frosty, grown-up world waiting beyond the edge of campus, feels spot on.
But most of don’t actually have college friends. We have campus friends. Undergrad friendships are not uniformly about shared passions, self-discovery, inexpertly performed oral sex, or even the particular intensity of being 19 and half-drunk on Goldschläger. Far more often, they are the product of propinquity, which may be the simplest concept to warrant four syllables. It means being physically close to someone – so close you share a bathroom or boyfriend or TA or bong. More than common cause or even common experience, it’s what creates “closeness.” In fact, in a 2008 study of Texas universities, economists Bruce Mayer and Christopher Puller found that dorm assignment made two people thirteen times more likely to become friends – making it a slightly less effective predictor than those students being Black and an almost 3x better predictor than those friends being Asian. Friendship isn’t magic. It’s a room assignment.
Here’s the uncomfortable part: That means friendship – at least for the sort of people who move for work then work to move up – is rarely free. College offers pay-to-play propinquity1 but after school lets out, successful grads often wind up with more money than time, which allows them to buy their way out of obligations and, in so doing, trade the intimacy of shared spaces for the convenience of sharing nothing at all. We almost all make that trade even though it leaves us starved for connection – right up until the moment we make peace with the idea of exclusivity and start paying to join clubs that would have us as members.
Not embarrassing.
The rich, ironically, never pay for it. In a 2016 study, researchers at Universidad de los Andes and MIT analyzed a trove of cell phone call logs and banking transactions from one million anonymous participants in a Latin American country. They sorted people into nine socioeconomic classes based on spending, then tracked who actually talked to whom. The “S9” members of the wealthiest group didn’t just have more connections, they had denser ones. On average, an S9 was eight times more likely to be connected to another S9 than random chance would predict. That’s not a chill. That’s a hot tub.
That solidarity among the well-to-do calls to mind Evelyn Waugh’s description of the patrician universe occupied by the Flyte family in Brideshead Revisited: “It was a place of such enchantment as I had never before experienced; everything seemed to belong together, each room opening into another, each person part of a single story.”
That story is the story of organized capital. Summer resorts. Intermarriage. Non-profit boards. For-profit capital calls. The whole… “you simply must meet Todd” thing. Almost more than money (and impunity) this is what we envy about the rich: They have a community that comes with obligations. And we, the Charles Ryders of the world, know it; we’ve all made friends with a Flyte2. In that same Latin American experiment, both S7s and S8s were more connected to S9s than they were to S6s. Climbing, like the sort of exclusion that has helped the rich build their community, is instinctual.
Kinda embarrassing.
Many members of the professional class – specifically more progressive ones – take issue with that kind of exclusivity. The residents of wealthy suburbs bemoan the lack of affordable housing stock just as private school parents give voice to concerns about prohibitive tuition, and travel soccer moms boo fees from the sidelines. Performative or not, this quasi-populist anti-gatekeeping rhetoric is rooted in the false premise that exclusivity is an aberration. In fact, people left to their own devices tend to self sort. S8s seek out S8s. S7s seek out S7s. The Asian kids sit together. Even if an exclusive school only caters to S6s, S7s, S8s, and S9s, those S8s are meeting S6s. The net effect of that kind of exclusivity is experienced by at least half of the students (arguably all) as inclusivity.
Again, campus studies can help us understand this because campuses are natural experiments in propinquity. The classic MIT “Westgate” study done in 1950 tracked friendships among married student veterans and their families in MIT’s campus housing. Researchers found that 65% of friendships were between people living in the same building, and within buildings, most were between immediate neighbors. People next door were far likelier to become close than those two doors away; residents near stairwells or mailboxes – places of repeated casual encounters – were oddly popular. Chance encounters led to friendships.
Given that we understand the mechanism of friendship creation and the value of friendships, it’s odd that more people don’t find a way to pay for chance encounters. But many of us have internalized the romantic idea that friendship is a naturally occurring phenomenon. Of course, it is – two things can be true – but it occurs naturally in specific environments we’re sometimes squeamish about paying to access.
We get more open to buying access – and to ROI-focused thinking more generally – when we are behaving as “professionals.” In that role, we sort of play ourselves like a third-person shooter. This makes us more rational ad more open to paid propinquity in the form of networking. Orgs like Chief and YPO have blown up in recent years because they help atomized, busy executive types build valuable relationships. These businesses owe their new revenue to transaction thinking and their recurring revenue to friendship.
Three months ago, wealth manager Andrew Lisi took to LinkedIn (as one does) to share his thoughts on not being part of a professional networking community: “I paid for friendship once. Why don't I want to again?… I joined a frat…. Why am I so resistant to pay for access to groups that promise the same thing?”
Most of the comments were from former frat brothers – somewhat proving the point – but several mentioned Mastermind, a platform founded by big-faced guru Tony Robbins that helps couches and area experts start groups and market them to professional niches.
The Mastermind business model works because it allows naturally social and entrepreneurial professionals to turn a club good, something possessed by a collective, into a personal good. In the book Catch-22, Milo Minderbinder3 says he can “lose money on every deal and make it up on volume.” In the book he’s importing Egyptian cotton, which is not a club good. That’s the joke. But Mastermind is selling connection and community, which are club goods. For them, the Milo Minderbinder model is no laughing matter. It’s like MLM Costco. It’s a really great business.4
That business is only going to get better as income inequality separates the top 15% of earners from the bottom 85% and the top 1% of havers from the bottom 99%. As S8s, S7s, and S6s (maybe) are able to buy their way out of more and more obligations, we’ll spend more and more of that money buying our way back in. Tennis clubs. Philanthropies. Coworking spaces. Destination weddings. Barry’s Boot Camp.
Embarrassing.
That last example is particularly interesting because “Boot Camp” gives so much away. Boot camps exist not just to train soldiers historically recruited from poor communities but also to help them bond via synchrony (activities in parallel), commensality (eating together), and ensnorification (made that one up). Because we can’t afford the social interconnectivity of the rich, we replicate the physical solidarity of the working class. We don’t want to fight in foreign wars, but we do want the social aspects of that life. Our ersatz answer to organized labor is organized leisure. It’s working really hard collectively to produce no particular outcome. It’s laying bricks minus the house at the end.
The scene that made Ben Affleck a movie star hits 55 minutes into Good Will Hunting (incidentally, a good movie with a dumb title) when his character Chuckie tells his brilliant friend Will Hunting, who is loathe to quick working construction and join the professional workplace: “Look, you’re my best friend, so don’t take this the wrong way but, in 20 years if you’re still livin’ here, comin’ over to my house, watchin’ the Patriots games, workin’ construction, I’ll fuckin’ kill ya. That’s not a threat, that’s a fact, I’ll fuckin’ kill ya.” Affleck delivers the line with the conviction of a guy who knows what it’s like to want to go to California.
But Will’s ultimate defection to the Bay Area isn’t all that joyful. He drives down the Mass Pike as credits roll – another young man going west alone. He’s brilliant and handsome and all that good stuff, but he’s also a future highly paid professional driving into the big chill. He may not be leaving the warmth of college, but he’s passing through a thermocline.
He’s about five years from joining Barry’s Boot Camp. Fortunately, there’s one conveniently located in the Stanford Shopping Center. If he drives over with the radio tuned to Classic Hits 103.7 he’s not unlikely to hear a familiar, yearning verse:
If I were the king of the world,
Tell you what I'd do:
I'd throw away the cars and the bars and the war…
Make sweet love to you.
