Six Degrees of Separation

Reading Time: 5 minutes

In May I flew from Florida to Wisconsin to celebrate my mother’s 90^th birthday.  That flight was pretty amazing for a couple of different reasons.  I wrote about it then calling it A Modern Miracle or Two.  You can read that short post by clicking on the linked title in the previous sentence.   

Yesterday the two women, both with Manitowoc (where my mom lives) connections, and I met for lunch.  We spent nearly 3 hours in the restaurant and the time flew by as fast as that 3-hour flight did the day we met. 

We weren’t just three women on the same flight with connections to one smallish city (about 35,000 people) in Wisconsin.  We were actually in Seats A, B, and C in the same row on the plane.  What are the chances?  It does seriously make you ponder how small the world really is.

It turns out that my sister and one of the women’s younger brothers went to school together and knew each other.  My mom worked as a waitress in a restaurant the other woman and her husband frequented.  As we talked (and talked and talked) we found lots of other connections to people we knew. We didn’t know each other before we met on the flight, but Sandy, Jill, and I shared so much commonality, we became instant friends.

The whole experience got me thinking about the Six Degrees of Separation.  That theory claims that each person on the planet is connected to any other person by a chain of six or fewer social connections.  The idea originated in the 1960s from an experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram.  In 2003 Columbia sociologist Duncan Watts wrote a book called Six Degrees: The Science of a Connected Age.   In an interview that year with Harvard Business Review, Watts explained that though the concept is much more complicated than Milgram realized, his main finding of six connections really is in the ballpark. Each link on the connection chain is often called a hop.

The whole theory seemed impossible to me on the surface.  How can I possibly be socially connected to every other human being on the planet by only six hops?

Then I started thinking….

When I was on Guam in the Air Force back in the early 1980s, I was required to attend some kind of training for newcomers to the island.  While waiting for the class to begin I got into a conversation with another airman. He said he’d just arrived on island from a base in Florida.  We exchanged information about where we were originally from. I told him I grew up in Wisconsin. He said he knew a guy in Florida who was from Wisconsin.  “Oh yeah,” I laughed, “what was his name?”  

I laughed because it was ludicrous to think I’d know the person he knew simply because we were both from Wisconsin.  I was shocked to discover the guy he knew was one of my second cousins! When he spelled the guy’s last name, which just happened to be my very unusual maiden name, I figured I ought to rush out and buy a lottery ticket. What are the odds??

Randy and I recently met a couple here in Rotonda West who used to own an exclusive and remote fly fishing lodge in Montana.  At lunch they told us about scores of famous people who came to their lodge and who they now call friends.  That means I’m connected to people like Tucker Carlson and the late Justice Scalia (for example) by only one degree of separation.  One of my good friends (counterculturemom.com) is a nationally known speaker and podcaster who used to be an actress in Hollywood.  So I guess I’m connected to some pretty well known folks by only one degree of separation through her, too.  Randy and I met General Flynn when we worked at his movie premier in Winter Haven, Florida in April. I have a picture of him with his arm around my shoulders. According to the theory, we’re connected to President Trump by only two hops.

Interesting.

The whole Six Degrees concept is so fascinating that there’s a plethora of pop culture associated with it.  Two films, Babel and Six Degrees of Separation deal with the concept.  Games, music, literature and television all explore the the theory in a myriad of different ways.  There’s a parlor game called The Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon. It became such a phenomenon that Kevin Bacon himself founded a charity called SixDegrees.org and in 2020 began a podcast called The Last Degree of Kevin Bacon.

One of my favorite Six Degree of Separation pop culture things is a Weird Al Yankovic song called Lame Claim to Fame.  Here are the lyrics.  And here’s the YouTube video in case you can’t live one minute longer without actually listening to it. 

Yup, maybe that’s all the Six Degrees of Separation really is….a lame claim to fame.  But it’s also fun, and in retirement, we’ll take fun whenever and however we can find it. 

Considering I, personally, am only three hops from the King of England (General Flynn, Trump, the King of England), the six degrees of separation seems entirely plausible.  Yes, indeed, it’s a small world after all. 

P.S. My excursion with Sandy and Jill gave me another freedom opportunity today. If I’m not careful, I’m going to have to try to convince Randy we need a second car after all. I have my eye on a cute little KIA Soul.