In modern times, unless you’re planning to live as a hermit deep in the mountains, you’re definitely going to have to deal with other people. Those who lack people skills will find it hard to get others’ support and cooperation and will often end up struggling alone. Those who are good with people, on the other hand, will find that they can leverage rich networks of mutual cooperation and assistance to accomplish challenging tasks with minimal expenditures of time and effort.

“Everything is simple with connections,” or so the saying goes. Likewise, “Having a way with people is a true skill and science.” One’s people skills can have a huge impact on career success and quality of life.

The complicated relationships among people in this world are like the crisscrossing strands of a network, and it seems that no one can escape that network’s all-enveloping reach.

In the West, there’s the concept of “six degrees of separation,” which is to say that on average you can link any two people through a chain of six acquaintances. The concept originated from the World War I era, when Frigyes Karinthy, a Hungarian writer of short stories, observed that advances in communications technology and the popularity of travel meant that personal networks were expanding and reaching ever farther. At the same time, the world seemed to be becoming smaller and smaller. Consequently, for any two randomly picked people, there would be a chain of acquaintances that linked them.

When this concept of “social links” appeared, it attracted the interest of mathematicians and sociologists, who separately set out to test its validity.

Harvard professor Stanley Milgram conducted his “small world” experiment in 1967. He took 160 volunteers from Omaha, Nebraska, and gave them a package that they were instructed to try to get to a person in Boston by sending it to someone they thought was more likely to know the target recipient. That new holder of the package would in turn send it to someone he knew, and so on. The first package arrived in four days and only needed to be sent twice. The remaining packages needed to be sent from two to 10 times before reaching the intended destination.

Many observers were skeptical about the results.

In 2001, a Columbia University professor used the medium of email to conduct a similar experiment, enlisting 48,000 participants to pass along a message to 19 ultimate recipients. On average the message had to be passed along six times to reach its goal. In 2007 researchers examined the data from 30 billion instant messages from conversations involving 240 million people on Microsoft Messenger. They discovered that the average number of links in an acquaintance chain connecting any two users was 6.6, thus giving rise to the concept of “seven degrees of separation.”

Whether there are six or seven degrees of separation, those connections form a vast network spanning the globe and enveloping all of us. Those who make advantageous use of this human network sometimes regard it as a fantastic “passbook of human capital,” which can be leveraged to advance one’s career. Consequently, one needs to manage it well, much like managing the money compounding with interest in one’s bank passbook. But others believe that describing the human network as a “passbook of human capital” is a bit too coldly utilitarian, or even calculating.

It is everyone’s fate in life to come in contact with other people, and among the least calculating of those relationships are the ones between classmates.

Is attending reunions something that people only feel inclined to do when they reach middle age?

I’ve discovered that on Internet social networks I suddenly have a lot of friends, but I’m not particularly intimate with most of them, nor am I quite sure about how I should go about having heart-to-heart talks with the ones who are new. Occasionally, I’ll get on Facebook and have a look, but only rarely do I write a post or press “like.” I take great satisfaction, however, in getting together with old friends.

My New Year’s resolution isn’t to eat more healthily, keep my weight down, or get more exercise. Rather, it’s to meet more often with old classmates and friends, so we can boost each other’s spirits as we walk down this path of life together.