Skip to main content

Deeper Relationships

I had a long talk with a good friend the other day about the need to have more friends on Facebook/Twitter/etc. and what it means to have more friends. We concluded that there's something instinctual about the desire to make your tribe larger. Our ancestors oftentimes survived by the size of their tribe and so we now continue to carry this base instinct to have a larger group of friends, family, and acquaintances just in case a saber tooth tiger decides to roll up and try to eat one of our babies.

I've decided that I'm much more interested in having deep meaningful relationships with a few people that are extremely important to me than to have lots of tangential friendships where we bond slightly over a delicious looking cheeseburger that I like. Because of this, I'm starting to use Facebook much different, I've removed all of the people that I don't talk to routinely unless I'm going to make a conscientious effort to improve our current relationship. Before doing this I had 316 "friends" on Facebook and I've now carved that down to roughly 40 people.

Will this get me to use Facebook differently? I hope so. I'd like to think of Facebook as an ongoing party of my most cherished relationships where I can jump over there to encourage and share in memories. I'd like to use it as a congregate of opinions that carry merit and where I'm open to the criticism of my ideas. I hope that I'm able to use it as a place to grow with my friends instead of a place to "improve my reach" or "promote a product".

I've you're reading this and we're no longer friends on Facebook it isn't at all because I hate you as our culture would have you believe. It's just because we don't talk often, if you'd like to be my friend again just let me know.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"The Push-up Experiment" or "How I learned that being able to see progress is motivating..."

I've found that when I'm able to visualize progress it motivates me. I'm not a productivity expert or a psychologist but this makes a lot of sense and I figured I'd share it even if you've heard it before. Since March 28th, I've been doing push-ups and tracking the number of push-ups I achieve in a spreadsheet. Yes, I know this completely classifies me as a total nerd, but I'm OK with that; I'm writing a blog post about my push-up spreadsheet, I'm well aware of the overall nerdiness going on here. I won't get into the nirty-gritty about how I used IFTTT  to send me a Google Drive survey every morning on my phone reminding me to do push-ups as well as providing a convenient place to simply enter the numbers. I won't go into the details about how that survey automatically goes into a Drive sheet and the graph (pictured below) automatically updates with each response. No, I won't go into that because I'm afraid that you will think ...
Post a Comment
Read more

I'm Restless

I've been thinking about doing a lot of different things lately. I've been wanting to learn the violin, go rock climbing, start a side business, and drive to the west coast, just to name a few. I'm not exactly sure where these urges started or why they're just now coming up but it seems that something in me is stirring. Part of this may be caused by my age; I'm not old by any means but in October of 2012 I turned 30. I've been living in the same house working at the same job for roughly 8 years now and I wonder if I'm starting to feel like I'm letting life pass me by. I'm sure this is a very normal feeling around my age and probably every milestone birthday from here on. I want to make sure that when I hit 40 I don't think to myself, "What did I do for the last 10 years?" I want to be able to look back and say "Wow, look at all the fun I had, the people I met, and the work I accomplished." I'm going to start right now,...
2 comments
Read more

My Life After LastPass

I'm sure this post is going to feel like a commercial and I'm fine with that. :) A friend (who will remain entirely anonymous) posted a light-hearted jest on Facebook about some password requirements being insane and asking about ways to make up a password that worked within these particular criteria. All of the usual suggestions came up: take a normal password and change some letters to numbers, the algorithm that you remember that turns the url of the site into a password, XKCD's awesome method at http://xkcd.com/936/ , and I mentioned LastPass . At this point I hadn't used LastPass, only heard about it and thought it would solve his problem. LastPass is a secure password management tool that will generate (and remember) new passwords for anything you want. The passwords tend to look something like this "bQ0SCNPS7Q1c" and are encrypted and stored locally as well as on their servers so that you can access them from anywhere. Your master password is the ke...
1 comment
Read more