Essay: The Friendship Paradox

The Friendship Paradox is driven, by the Idea that most of my friends have more friends than I do.
For mathematical proof of all this, read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Friendship_paradox .

Learning this, was no surprise for me; my very few real friends know exactly what I mean.
Over the years, my ideas of friendship has come to the Revelation that all we need is just one Real Friend.
But that is not the issue here.
There is stunning proof - see the mathematical evidence - that this fact applies in general to all participants in a Social Network, and not only to lonely me.
Mind you: in general, which means in mathematical terms: by Means, on Average.

   Herein - of couse - lies the Paradox; how is that possible?
This assumption may easily lead to the conclusion, that there are more Friends in The Universe than there are People. You got to love Social Media.
Where, do all the extra friends come from? And where are they? Lost Dark Matter?
If everyone thinks - on average - that everybody else has more friends, than why is there still War?
Or is that exactly the reason, why we wage war?

   And what is this thing with Popularity?
How is it possible, that in some networks some people have hundreds of friends? Are they really that nice?
Of course not: from practice , I have learned that people with large networks are usually lousy friends. Simple enough: they never have time for you; always busy maintaining their pathetic network.
Sadly enough: this group of networkers make this ridicilous mathematical concept possible. They provide the illusion, that there are people with more friends than we all do.

   However: I see, more holes in here.

   First of all, this paradox is driven, by the assumption that there is such a thing as "friend of a friend", thus: a friend in the second degree; this is - of course - wishful thinking. Most second degree, or third degree 'friends' we rarely have contact with. The assumption of 'mutual friendship' is also hypothetic; this need not be the case.

   Second, this - mathematical - phenomenon is highly influenced by the possibility of one individiual having many friends: this is explained by 'so-called' popularity; this also - of course - is a very hypothetic assumption. Most people with large networks have very few real friends, to be realistic.
And they get the Influenza more often; does that make them more popular? It is indeed a strange world, we live in.

   In short: we are considering mathematical proportions of unbalanced networks; we are talking about nodes, not real friends.
So we must skip the philosophical bit; we are not talking about real people, we are talking about distant nodes, and multiple degrees of separation.
We are not talking about real friendships here.

   We are talking about the behaviour of networks, formed by Social Media, not from Social Behaviour.
That is the real paradox, here.