Quantifying Friendship: What 1.2 Million Messages Reveal About Connection and Decay
By
Vadim Drobinin
The kind of bagel that ruins lesser bagels for you.
Summary
A deeply personal essay about using data science and personal analytics to measure and understand friendship quality over time. The author imported 1.2 million messages from multiple social platforms into an Obsidian vault, using local LLM inference to analyze decay curves, vocabulary shifts, directional sentiment, and conflict rates in their relationships. The piece reflects on whether quantifying friendships can truly capture their meaning, inspired by Tim Urban's "Life in Weeks" grid, and grapples with the tension between data-driven measurement and the lived, emotional experience of being a friend.
Key quotes
· 3 pulledThe grid suggests it's the events that matter - jobs, trips, schools, marriages - and those are easy to mark. But they hardly tell how I felt during those weeks, or what I was like to the people around.
I started tracking things partly because of it - I wanted the grid to mean something, not just count down.
The biometric data is an odd representation of how fulfilling my life has been.
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