Having friends is a great asset towards keeping our sanity – and while it takes work, who doesn’t want to hang out, eat, drink and be merry with others?
So what constitutes friendship? Is it having lots of connections on LinkedIn or Facebook that you continuously exchange messages with? Is it walking into a room and having others approach you and call out your name?
Let’s get one thing out there – most people are courteous but this doesn’t mean they are your friend. Congeniality sets the tone of friendship but you can also be congenial with complete strangers.
One thing that is happening today is that our reliance on Internet and mobile technologies are actually moving us away from friendship into more cyber or techno-relationships.
We are socially becoming dependent on technology that we are losing sight of what it means to communicate with people. I mean if two people on a date can communicate by texting each other across the table, why meet face-to-face?
While tablets are great replacements to books there is just something special about holding books as well. While web conferencing can connect two people in disperse locations, there is something special about personal face-to-face presence rather than cyber-presence. We can engage in texting and instant messaging relationships but these tools don’t build relationships.
Worse, what I am seeing, is that we are communicating with others just for the sake of communicating. We can tell anyone out there in the world what we are up such as “just boarding a plane”, “sticking my legs out of the car”, to “just blew my nose” as if people care about this. Well, I guess some people do but many of us read this.
Why do we need to do this? It’s becoming unclear to me what the real purpose of some of the technical tools we use to quickly tell others something about us are really intended to achieve.
It seems to me as if the underlying subliminal strategy of technical companies is to encourage usage of these applications to create more work for ourselves and expend energy typing useless sentences about day-to-day life that really achieve no purpose whatsoever,other than communicating basic action that all human beings take.
It is the rules of keeping in touch that we need to be cognizant of.
Setting aside technology, I also see another problem – a human one. Due to lack of meeting in person we are thinking the fastest way to bridge the gap in face-to-face to communication is to maintain continuous contact and presence. You may find this is the case if you have friends that call you up one day to go over the standard “how are you doing questions” to call you up the next day to ask the same basic questions you answered the previous day.
Over-communication is a complete waste of time, in my opinion.
Look, I am not saying not to talk or not to put your presence out in the cyber-world for everyone to know about, but at this rate this level of communication is overkill and we will go crazy with this “communicating for sake of communicating” phenomenon.
Repetitive calling and continuous acts of posting common human actions on the Internet are making communications inorganic and unnatural. Eventually the turning point will come where one party in the friendship will simply not care to communicate and disengage.
From my experience this happens a lot with “friends” who live within a respectable driving distance, say 1 hour from each other, who don’t have any time to meet and are so busy with life. So, the worse thing they do to sustain the friendship is call each other all the time to talk about the same things boring each other out.
My recommendation is to call to discuss personal issues you are facing and let the small chit-chat talk be held for times you can meet in person.
There is certainly the argument to be made about “out of town” or long-distance relationships – but these are tough to maintain. Those relationships within close proximity always win. People like human-to-human interaction.
The question remains as to why relationships wane based on phone conversations of individuals within close proximity to each other or on text messages. The issue that is confronted is that the phone or email is used as the medium to make up for lost time interacting face-to-face.
What many don’t realize is that the times when old friends meet and it seems like “it was just yesterday” is the due to the fact that both parties are ever-so present that there is no concept of time. This is so much better than repetitive “communicating for the sake of communicating” engagement.
What is the moral of this post? If you are in close proximity to “friends” and an effort is not made to meet up frequently, those relationship will naturally wither and wane and it simply has to do with the fact that just like any relationship out there, it takes interaction, specifically face-to-face interaction, to sustain the relationship.
So, get out there and make an effort to meet up with friends periodically. Stop repetitive chit-chat and save it to meeting up more often.
Stop posting what you are doing every minute of the day for your friends to read about what you are up to and tell them in person, face-to-face.
Oh – and when you meet make it so that there is no concept of time. Keeping this in mind alone, especially when there are longer gaps in meeting, will give you more moments of having met your friend just yesterday.