Six Handshakes Away
There is a phrase people repeat when talking about how strangely small the world can feel: everyone is six handshakes away from everyone else. At first, it resembles charming exaggerations that spreads because it feels poetic and comforting. The idea is known as six degrees of separation. The basic claim is simple. If you choose any two people in the world, there is likely a chain of acquaintances linking them together in roughly six steps. You might know someone who knows someone who knows someone, and after only a few introductions, the chain unexpectedly reaches a complete stranger on the other side of the planet (Six Degrees of Separation). Though it may seem fictive, it is a real and measurable phenomenon, and its truth can be found in online experimental data that changes daily.
This idea gained attention through an experiment conducted by social psychologist Stanley Milgram in the 1960s. Milgram asked participants across the United States to deliver a letter to a person they had never met (Stanley Milgram). In the experiment, they were not allowed to send it directly, but instead, each participant passed it to someone they personally knew who they believed might be closer to the target. Then that person would do the same and continue the pattern until the letter reached the target person. When the letters finally arrived, the number of people involved in the chain (the number of steps it took) was surprisingly small, with the average being just six steps (Stanley Milgram).
Human life, it turns out, is naturally gravitational: we pull toward the familiar, and the familiar pulls back. We live inside circles: families, friend groups, schools, workplaces, cities. Within those circles, most people know many of the same individuals (Granovetter). However, every cluster also contains a few people whose lives reach outward into entirely different worlds. This can be seen when someone moves to a new city, changes careers, or even just by meeting a stranger (Granovetter). These small, almost accidental connections quietly stitch separate communities together until the entire world becomes one network connected in six steps. What strikes me most, though, is not the number itself. It is what the structure of that network suggests about what we are afraid of, and what we might be missing.
Most of our relationships are defined as strong ties: close bonds that shape our daily world: our closest friends, our family, the people we see every day (Granovetter). Though these ties are precious, they hold a flaw: the people closest to us tend to have nearly the same social circle. Our world, without us ever choosing it, begins to echo itself. We unknowingly build a barrier of familiarity to safeguard against the unknown, people you never knew you ought to meet.
When real bridges between worlds form, they create something extraordinary. They reach outside the familiar cluster into a pool of new ones. They bring news from other worlds, connecting a city of knowledge and creativity. A single phone call can change your outlook on life. An unexpected conversation can introduce you to a community you never knew existed; a community that turns out to be precisely where you belong. And yet, most of us resist making that bridge. Through no fault of our own, we choose the familiar; not because we are incurious, but because reaching outward takes courage. It requires accepting uncertainty when approaching someone we don’t know, and tolerating the vulnerability of not yet knowing how we will be received. Although these are small risks, they feel large when we are staring them down.
Six degrees of separation shows that this risk is one worth pursuing. The stranger sitting next to you on a train isn’t an isolated individual. They are the center of a human tapestry you cannot yet see; lives filled with knowledge, experience, perspective, and possibility. No matter where you are in the world, you are only a few steps away from everyone else.
After sitting with this idea, I have come to believe it carries something quietly radical: it poses a case for openness as a way of life. The willingness to be occasionally surprised by people. To let a conversation go somewhere unexpected. To remember that the person in front of you is not a background character in your story, but the main character of their own, surrounded by an entire cast you have never met.
The world becomes smaller only when we reach outward. And when the world becomes smaller, we do not feel less significant; we become more held. More part of something.
So perhaps the real lesson of six degrees of separation is not only that everyone is connected. It is that the distance between isolation and belonging isn’t as vast as loneliness makes it seem. The single act of extending your hand toward a stranger, no matter what, is the beginning of an entirely different life.