How to Make Friends the Hard Way and the Easy Way

Try not to treat people as things

If you just start walking, eventually you’ll bump into someone.

This might take a while. You might be lucky and walk right into a crowd of people, but if you’re in a sparsely inhabited area, it could take weeks. If you start walking from a random location in an area containing some number of people, you can calculate the time it will take to run into someone by using the physics concept of a mean free path:

time per collision = 1 / collisions per hour = 1 / (shoulder width + average torso diameter) × speed × population density of area

Some areas certainly make encounters easier than others. Here’s the average collision interval for a few different regions:

• Canada: 2.5 days
• France: 2 hours
• Delhi: 75 seconds
• Paris: 40 seconds
• Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta during a sold-out game: 0.6 seconds
• The field during the game: 3 minutes