Friends in a package

Some friends come in a package. They work in an all(or most)-or-nothing mode--either all (or 90% in the most-or-nothing mode) of the members in the package show up or they won't see each other at all.

There are three main advantages of package friends:

1. Time efficient
Common sense quiz: is it cheaper to buy 6 cans of coke in a package or one at a time? It goes without saying that time means money. The same analogy for friends: which makes the best value of time, seeing 6 friends (let's say there are 7 including you in this package) altogether in an hour or seeing just 3 at one time and the other 3 some time later?

2. Sum of parts does not equal the whole
ok, we're not that money-minded, right? So let's look at the quality. Simply put: seeing 3 at one time and the other 3 at the other is just different from seeing all of them in one shot. By the way, can we still define three out of the original six members the same package? You've got your own answer.

3. That's how our brain works
How does our brain encode a person in our mind? A person does not really stand alone as a person in our brain. It is tagged with different labels like college friends, hallmates, childhood friends, things like that. So a name like Ada alone won't ring any bell unless it is tagged with some affiliations like the Ada from your PGDE year or the Ada from your high school. That's why friends come in a package because that's how they make sense to us. Basically, we don't personally know each individual in a package but we know them as a group. Singling out a few from a group makes a different representation and thus they are more like strangers than friends as represented in our brain. In a word, that's nature.

Because of the all/most-or-nothing nature, meeting a package of friends takes a long time to make arrangements in advance and is getting more and more difficult as time goes by while work, boyfriends/girlfriends and new packages keep cramming into our lives and pushing the old packages down the priority-until they disappear.

Yes, that's the nature. The nature of life. We just can't keep everybody. We are bound to lose someone along the way--losing them in a package.