Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one’s posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.
Social media is on the decline. Instagram is all ads. No one’s posting on BeReal. TikTok is for influencers. The new place for sharing: group chats.
Could I ask why you don’t want to talk to half the people you know? I have the opposite issue where I try to talk to people I know but they don’t reciprocate, I’m finding it hard to imagine the inverse.
To add an additional perspective, it’s not that I dislike these people, some of them I love, but my time has so many asks as it is, and I just cannot maintain active relationships with that many people who have no other impact on my daily life. There are a few I would make time for when the opportunity comes around, but I can’t keep sustained things going with more than a few people. I say can’t, but what I mean is that I prefer to spend the vast majority of my time with my wife and kids, and I will use just about any amount of time that I can spare for parents, siblings, and their kids. I have a few friends who fit into the same group as the family. After that, it’s occasional messages, Christmas cards, and the rare visit/meet up. If you are there for the good, you should be prepared to be there for the bad, in my opinion. I cannot offer that to too many people beyond immediate family. Also, I certainly don’t have the money to support some of those folks through their rough patches, and saying “no” to people you care about sucks.
Interesting, thanks for the response. Robin Dunbar is a psychologist and anthropologist who studies friendship. His claim to fame is ‘Dunbar’s Number’ which is a general statement of how many friends a person can have. It varies from person to person and is influenced by one’s environment, age, beliefs, etc.
He has a way of expressing how relationships manifest themselves based in closeness, I have an
here.
This seems to map to what you’re saying. Another thing he said was that the more close friends you have, the less acquaintances you’ll have, and vice versa. There are limits to the number of people you interact with and it can be seen as a sort of hierarchy.
I wanted to ask to get a better understanding: Why do you prefer more time with your kids and wife? Is the idea that your time is better spent to positively affect them and yourself (i.e. enjoying your time with family) and it’s better to ‘put your eggs in one basket’ so to speak? That there is an investment required to have some kind of benefit to make it worthwhile to spend time with others and with family there is a predictable outcome? Do you ever actively engage in criteria to evaluate the methods, reasons, or heuristics you use to determine who to spend time with or who to allocate resources to?
My notion is more investment is given to those who we are closer to due to some perceived positive effect but those heuristics are only ever rules of thumb and wholly influenced by reasons outside of our control. The conclusion is made and then we work backwards to find justification.
I have a friend who spends every weekend with their family, in the infrequent times we do see one another they complain about their parent’s misunderstanding and causing them distress. Rightfully so, as their parents are a bit old-fashioned to say the least. What confused me was, this is a bit machiavellian, they have already seemingly reaped many of the benefits from engaging with their parents and they may be better suited to distributing their time intentionally so as to have a better outcome for themselves and even their parents who are a bit reliant on them and whose ways are set-in further as the friend plays their part in the pattern. They are acclimatized to their environment (with their parents) and the extent that they can predictably or intentionally cause meaningful improvements or positive outcomes is set.
I always thought it would make sense to continually test alternative strategies because at any point one can become ‘comfortable’ at a given local minima or maxima more or less arresting any further development or change. The violent refusal when the topic is broached, and the absolute certainty to which they claimed their current method was superior caught me off-guard and made me confused.
Very interesting! Thanks for that Robin Dunbar info!
Of course! Here’s is a link I have more resources as well if you’d like.
A quote from another article I have saved:
According to John Cacioppo, a social neuroscientist who specialized in the study of loneliness (he died in 2018), humans would have evolved a built-in bias against easily making friends because avoiding an enemy would have been more important than making a friend. “If I make an error and detect a person as a foe who turns out to be a friend, that’s O.K., I don’t make the friend as fast, but I survive,” Dr. Capiocco said in a 2017 interview in The Atlantic. “But if I mistakenly detect someone as a friend when they’re a foe, that can cost me my life. Over evolution, we’ve been shaped to have this bias.”
A link for the second article here
Getting older. Lots of drama. Lots of political bullshit I can’t stand anymore and don’t want to hear about. Not saying my situation is the healthiest in the world but that is how I am feeling these days.
Ah, ok makes a ton of sense. Thanks for the response.
There are people I liked a lot in earlier stages of my life, that I no longer have the desire to talk to not due to anything they did, but just them being from a period in my life I’d rather forget or move on from. In some cases it might be people whose main shared interested with me was what we did for work, which I no longer do.
I hear you. I always found it to be very unfortunate :/