Don’t Waste Water

If you follow me on Twitter (and you should ‘cause I’m gas) you might have seen a tweet I threw into the ether on Thursday. This week I tried to stop texting people first. From Wednesday to now, I’ve been trying to only interact with people who text me first. It was an experiment of sorts. I wanted to see how many of my interactions die when I’m not steering the ship. When I wasn’t making the first effort, I wanted to know how many friendships self-maintained. The answer is not a whole lot of them.

That sounds bleak in fairness. When you break it down it’snot though. My intentional embargo on making the first move just highlighted avery common, and very important thread in our experience; not everyone likes you as much as you do, or want them to. That’s actually fine as well by theway. If everyone simply adored you, you’d find life to be quite boring. We needto remember that just because we hold something to be of value (a relationship, anactivity etc.) it doesn’t mean everyone else has to. Just because you want to talk to someone, it doesn’t mean that this will be reciprocated (I wrote about this more here). It also doesn’t make the other person bad, it just means they have different priorities, and you may not be as high up on their list as they are on yours.

That being said, it was of course surprising to see how many dead flowers I was watering. There are several situations that only exist because I was forcing them to. Conversations were only happening because I started them. These weren’t genuine conversations, but rather obligatory responses. These situations are easy to pin-point when you start to look for them. They’re not beneficial for either party involved, and they create the illusion that a meaningful interaction might exist where there is none. I’d recommend highlighting these interactions and cutting them out. It doesn’t have to be dramatic, or even harbor any hard feelings, but there’s no point in convincing yourself that other people care as much as you do when it is clear that they do not.

There were several upsides to my sabbatical from making effort on social media too. The huge thing I noticed was that I was on my phone far less throughout the day which can only be a good thing. I was also able to identify people who just weren’t as invested as me in talking, which let me focus on people in my life who want to be there. Basically, the amount of time I spent on my phone went down, but the benefits I was getting from my interactions went up. We’ll chalk that up as a win.

This may not have been relate-able for you in the slightest. However, if you’re like me, you have a tendency to second guess whether people actually appreciate you or not. Doing this for a few days simply allowed me to verify which people I make effort with actually want that effort. The take home here is to let sinking ships sink. Stop watering dead flowers, and be sound to yourself.

G’luck.