Why don't we keep in touch?
We can postpone... until we can't anymore.
This experiment* is getting serious. We are now 168 subscribers. Not many, but hey, it’s honest work. I would like to reach 200 and would appreciate you sharing it with someone you think would be interested. You can see more precisely what am I writing about here. And as always, thank you for reading. 🙏
In 2021 I planned to reconnect with people. I cleaned up my Google Contacts list, added birthdays, small notes here and there, anniversaries, names of children, other interesting stuff like “watches F1.”
Then I created a Zapier integration, labelled a lot of you with ‘weekly’, ‘quarterly’ and ‘annualy’. Today it feels like a deja-vu; I occasionally dug deep with things I was not even sure if I will ever use or need.
Once I spent a couple of hours integrating a stopwatch into PowerPoint slides. Dear Lord have mercy and I am not even religious.
Anyway, Zapier sent me emails who I need to contact. It worked. But I stopped using it after six months.
How often do you say, “Yes, we should meet up more,” or, “Let’s repeat this, it was fun”? I know. I do it too. So why do we only think about it, even declare it openly, but rarely do it? And it cuts both ways; not only you did not do it—they also probably didn’t, did they? Naughty.
I tried my best, really did, and failed; ok, I improved but could have still done much better. The same as you, admit it. It is also possible my standards of “keeping touch” are completely out of line. I totally should call people more, wtf, really, cannot be that hard!?
Anyway, what about you? Are you happy with how much you do? Let me know.
So, finally, why did I stop using my Zapier or why we don’t keep touch? Reduced to a bare minimum, I am left with a mixture of these three reasons:
1. We do not care enough.
This one is tough. If you cared, you’d call or do something. But you don’t care enough. And they also don’t care; they also didn’t do anything, did they? As it seems, we mutually don’t give a shit.
2. Life happens.
Sometimes I feel as if I am at the early stages of Alzheimer’s. I forget events, people and their names. At the same time I hope that human brain is like a computer with limited memory. To accommodate new information, we erase the old. People meet new people, get married, have kids, move to another country and change priorities.
3. We take each other for granted.
Yes, we will do it tomorrow or next week, or next month, or next year. And then at some point there won’t be another chance. The craziest thing is that I already know I will be thinking, “I should have stayed in touch more,” yet still not able to do anything against this future regret.
Staying in touch is the easiest to postpone, because we can do it tomorrow until we can’t.
But somehow losing touch is also fine. We don’t need to always and forever be in touch; we can reconnect anytime, nobody will mind. In theory we are anyway limited to 150 stable relationships; and as I wrote sometime ago it can also be liberating to be forgotten.
At least I have your birthday and we will always have a New Year.
*The reason I am taking this experiment more serious is because I participated in Substack Go, where I met a group of amazing people. Check out their newsletters:
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I like this. I have two brothers who rarely take part in the family connections. Do you think men aren't very well trained to do this? Just curious. BTW, I use my driving time to connect with people. Whenever I'm in the car, I call someone (bluetooth!) or use Siri to send a a few texts. Pandemic has caused all of us to get out of the habit of seeing people in person.... but on the plus side I feel NO compunction to hug everyone I see when I see them!
Hey Igor, my friend Punit recommended this article, so here I am :) This is a very well written, thought provoking piece, and captures the essence of the world we are living in. I had read some time ago, that this is the fastest that we as humans have disbanded ever since we know humanity to exist - and the rate of disbanding is alarming, especially for a species which is social and which thrives on being part of "tribe(s)". This has of course created the loneliness pandemic too - research suggests that the lonelier one is, the more likely that their social connections become a distant blur, and this becomes a vicious cycle. In essence, lonelier people over time lose the ability to reach out and start new social interactions, and I think, it must then be the less lonely who need to come to the rescue :)