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Collectively Overrun

Posted on 3 mins read

Another day, another delay, another first world problems blog post. Recently I've had the absolute worst problem: not responding to friends who say they want to hang out. I have this weird symptom where if I don't respond to the first person, then I'm going to ignore everyone else after them. It really shouldn't be a a priority thing, but it totally is. I feel like I have to treat social media like a first in, first out queue, otherwise the people at the back will be forgotten.

I use Asana to keep track of my personal projects and other random to-dos. I've recently started a Social section on there, just to try and keep track of all the people I care about. Some people may think this is kind of weird, if not outright pathetic. I'm basing all of this based on the initial HackerNews comments to a tool that does this exact thing: Monica. Now, I know what you're going to say:

  • It's HackerNews, period
  • You're taking social recommendations from HackerNews
  • Who cares what other people think
  • It's HackerNews, idiot

But still, it really got to me. For the longest time, I would just try to mentally keep track of everything. If something (or really, someone) dropped out, then so be it. I'm only human. I think this is what most people do, and things just happen and we all agree it's ok. To be clear, I think this is OK! We are definitely all human and can't remember everything. This is mostly just coming down to me being personally frustrated with not being able to return all the appreciation I feel like my friends are giving me. The super ironic part of all of this is that they are my friends, which means they are even more likely (and honestly, guaranteed) to not care about social slippages. We're already friends! Yes, we all tend to live far away now and seeing everyone whenever you can is great, but it's just not always possible. Still, I want to try and make sure I maximize this.

The final part of this is: well, what spurned this? Everything was going, if not great, but at least fine, before. I went to the UIUC career fair for a day and a half, and I barely saw half the people I wanted to. Even with the people I did have a chance to see, it was more often than not a quick 15 minute “hi hey hello I missed you how is life". This is probably a larger ~meme~ part of being an adult, and I should just accept it. Just because it is eventually going to happen doesn't mean it has to happen now! Or at the very least, I can try and stave it off as long as possible.

Anyways, in summary: I don't know how other people do it. Maybe they do it just fine. If I've ignored you (which is one of like… eight people right now) my bad! It's totally my fault and I actively think about it every day. I responded to everyone today and started logging it, so this shouldn't happen again. For a few weeks!