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.”
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