How to Make Friends the Hard Way and the Easy Way
Try not to treat people as things
Published in
5 min readAug 28, 2019
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:
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