How COVID-19 Wrecked Our “Weak Ties”

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Via pxhere

Earlier this week, the comedian Sean Bair Flannery tweeted something that neatly described a side-effect of the pandemic.

As he wrote …

This clearly resonated with people; there were 38,000 retweets only a day later. (Here’s a link to his original tweet.)

Several of the replies coined some fun terms for these “incidental buddies” that Flannery talked about; one of my favorites was this one …

“Satellite friends” is a great metaphor!

But it turns out there’s also a phrase from sociology that describes precisely these sorts of peripheral people:

They’re “weak ties”.

And it turns out they play surprisingly important roles in our lives.