Think of your personal and professional network as a series of six concentric circles that decrease in emotional intensity as you move toward the larger outer rings. The innermost circle contains the few people you turn to in times of severe distress. The outermost circle is made up of the roughly 1,500 acquaintances whom you would recognize by sight. The authors compared the personal and work networks of hundreds of individuals pre- and post-pandemic and found that the size of the outermost ring has shrunk. That shrinkage was accompanied by a strengthening of our closest relationships. Maintaining connection to the outer …
