Whether the internet does or does not make us happy or satisfied with life, there is one respect in which the balance is definitely in the negative, and this by a sizeable margin. The internet has becoming the hunting ground for a community individuals intent on fleeing the vulnerable and the desperate.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
Texting does work as a channel for communication, but it is slow and clunky. The person you are texting may have switched their phone off while you were composing your elegantly witty reply. You get no response. You are left emotionally high and dry: did you say something that offended them, or were they just not interested in your declaration of eternal love or your diatribe against the world?
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
Old age brings its own peculiar terrors. No longer is it possible to believe, as we all did in our younger days, that we are indestructible and will live for ever. We have seen too many friends and family die. We have begun to experience the inevitable frailty of the human body. We lack the energy and the stamina to do what we once did.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
The social world is probably the single most complex thing that we ever have to deal with in everyday life. A surprising number of scientists think that finding food is the most complex thing animals have to face. I am inclined to observe that the problem with most such scientists is that they don’t have much of a social life.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021
Romantic relationships as well as friendships result from our deliberately putting reality on hold: we place a halo round the individual concerned. Not to put too fine a point on it, it is not another person that we fall in love with, but an avatar that we have created in our mind.
—Robin Dunbar, Friends, Little Brown, 2021