Friendships & Inner Circles
Professional managers are not always awesome at managing their personal lives.
By Andrew Burmon
2% Of respondents chose zero for "how many people could you reasonably call in the middle of the night during a crisis?"
86% Of respondents think they meet their friends halfway.
7% Of respondents see their best friend once a week or more.
75% Of respondents have between two and six close friends.
Upper Middle 's Friendship Drift survey measured the radius and half-life of Oat Milk Elites' social circles.
Focusing on the work of friendship , the survey sought to understand the source, value, and upkeep of voluntary relationships, and how people accustomed to managing things — careers, money, calendars, households — manage each other's expectations.
Most upper-middle-class friendships begin in one of two places: school or work.
Friendship is a shared project, and like most shared projects it emerges from other ones — failed chemistry classes and startups — receding when newer projects take precedence.
College is the most common source of close friends (23%), narrowly beating work (19%), with high school (14%) and then hobbies and hometowns trailing.
The dominant cultural narrative is that everyone is drowning (and bowling) alone 1 .
But only a smaller number of survey respondents self-reported having no friends (4%) or only one friend (3%).
The vast majority of respondents (75%) reported having between two and six friends with most of those respondents closer to six.
If 'ships are sinking, they are doing so slowly: roughly half of respondents reported the same number of friends as a few years ago (49%) – though more reported contraction (31%) than growth (20%).
And many if not most of these relationships are durable – substantial enough to survive a 3 a.m.
phone call.
Asked how many people they could call during an emergency, more than nine in ten respondents (92%) could name at least two people , and nearly one in five could name more than five (19%).
For working professionals, job constraints and rewards shape friendships in a wide variety of ways.
The first and most obvious is that jobs serve as a source of new friends 2 , specifically for those in sales and business development who were more likely (50%) than others to report large social circles 3 .
Engineers reported the smallest circles, with none claiming seven or more close friends (0%).
More contacts, more friends — it's a numbers game.
The competent tend to befriend the competent, and end up with access to far more competence than any one life requires.
The other factor strongly correlated with friend count is income.
Among respondents earning under $100,000, a relatively small number of respondents (10%, n=21) reported seven or more close friends; among those earning $500,000+ over a third (36%) could field a basketball team and two subs.
It's a gap in capacity, not affection: money matters because it buys time.
