Mark Liu: Week 5

I discovered I need exactly fifty people in my life that I actually care about to be content. If I have any more, I will spread myself too thin and any fewer, I will not have enough of a representation of the world.

I am talking about the Mark Liu 50.

The concept is simple. Football has a premiership, and so has my friends list. It’s an exclusive group to be a member of and if you are in it, I will talk to you, generally show you respect, and pretend to care about your inane theories about the financial crisis. If you are in a tier below, I will only interact with you if I need something, otherwise providing one-word answers until you go away.

The number fifty was derived very simply. I merely used an equation on the number of hours I’ve dedicated to social rituals and then differentiated many times. It came out as exactly fifty. If you want to adopt this system, I suggest adding 5n where n equals how needy you are out of 100.

Fifty is quite a handy number. It allows all sixteen Myers-Briggs personality types to be represented, even ESFPs who I absolutely despise (I’m an INTJ, or “scientist”). It also allows fair representation from the world’s four major ethnicities: five, if you include Australian. I really like their accents, which are comical in a brutish way.

Don’t take your friends for granted though; they can disappear within an instance. For example, I culled my entire Facebook friends list once because I thought I could get away with having only zero friends (this is why I only have people from Cambridge on FB). After all, friends are only there to disappoint you. A lot of my friends let me down the other day by refusing to marathon the new series of Arrested Development this Sunday because of “exams”. It must be said: there is something very satisfying and understandable about a mass purge.

Strangely, I found myself missing people. It was a weird feeling, a lot like when I stopped being breastfed. It turns out that, even though I know I am a genius, I still require that validation from people and therefore need to cultivate a circle of chums to caress my ego.

I also missed all their banal stories, which I can usually predict the ending of as soon as they get to the second act. Not enough real-life anecdotes have the complexity or depth of Christopher Nolan movies or even try to, so why even bother telling them?

However, it turns out their idiocy is like a meningitis vaccine. Small doses of stupidity prepare me for the moronic inflammation that the rest of the world delivers. Keeping the intellectually inferior around helps me understand people like them, allowing me to exploit them in the future if need be.

Of course, you are still liable to be relegated from the illustrious club. Looking at the Mark Liu 50 now, I am actually very disappointed with the low standard. I am actually opening the comments section up to applications into the top tier. Please post your personality type, ethnicity and special skills or talents, as well a 140 character summary of why you should be in it.

This is a one-time offer, because I am distraught by some of the people who sneaked their way into the top fifty by default (Imran). I came to Cambridge with the vague goal of finding people like me, but this didn’t happen. Instead, I found faux-intellectual-alpha-males, who engage in pseudo-debates to wave their academic wangs. Or I found people who are technically intelligent, but nowhere near as socially developed as I am, therefore unable to engage in an Avatar-style connection of minds. I constantly find myself dissatisfied by the people around me.

Another friend genocide may be imminent.