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Comment by notreallyserio | Hacker News Reader

The biggest reason I don't maintain contact with people from my past is I was a much worse person in my past and I'm either embarrassed about my behavior or concerned that my shittiness is what led to our relationship in the first place.

In any case, I find it's easier (and emotionally satisfying) to stay in touch with a couple people that I can have natural, unforced conversations with. Scheduling interactions on a calendar feels odd. It makes me think of those emails you get "from" somebody after signing up for a service, and after a few you notice their time stamps all end in 00:00.

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> The biggest reason I don't maintain contact with people from my past is I was a much worse person in my past and I'm either embarrassed about my behavior or concerned that my shittiness is what led to our relationship in the first place.

Perfect summary. The people I'm still in contact with are those that grew into better people together with me.

I like to think I chose depth over breadth. I can count my real friends on one hand and I feel like we have deep and meaningful friendships. They're people who I've been through some shit with, or people who I'd be prepared to go through some shit with if it came to it.

Everyone else is someone who can come and go. How long are they around for? Who knows, it's just a temporary crossing of paths that feels nice while it lasts. I couldn't maintain a connect with hundreds of people unless fate crossed our paths again.

But, you know, even those deep connections might be temporary, just on a longer timeframe. If one connection faded then perhaps there'd be room for a new one.

I'm like you -- but for people who I was good friends with years ago and lost touch with, I usually find that we immediately hit it off great if we connect somewhere in person. For this reason I'm optimmistic about the possibility of maintaining a wider net.

I think this is for higher level contact - not personal friendships. Networking for professional development - more along those lines.

Something I need to get back into. Interacting, at least casually, on a routine basis with a wide amount of people has lead to every job I have ever held - they came to me based on my reputation or past interactions. It's definitely the best way to get a new (and better) job rather than blindly fishing for them.

That's the real power of systems like this. Not to develop personal friendships, but to remain relevant in the eyes of a large number of people so that if they have a future opportunity you will be top of mind for how they can get it addressed.

I think it's why he stresses making the contacts personal and with meaning/value specific to that person. These aren't soulless automated computer generated emails, but a system to prompt him to write relevant and sincere contact messages.

Is it a lot of work? Sure. But building up a network of people who see you as contributing value is priceless.

I feel the same. In fact, I intentionally avoid interacting with people from my past since they may have bad memories involving me that I'd be resurfacing by contacting them. I've considered reaching out to certain people to apologize, but I stopped when I realized I was mostly just looking for absolution rather than actually trying to make them feel better. To me, the kindest thing I can do is stay out of their lives.

I do the same, but it often makes me worried about what kind of person I am. I don't really have too much to apologize about - at least that I know of. But for some reason, I tend to grow apart from people who know my past or who simply know too much about me. Not every single one of them, but apart from very few people, this is the case. I think it's safe to say I have trust issues, but I never understood why, as I haven't suffered any trauma and don't really have a reason to be this way.

I consider this to be a bad trait, because finding new friends isn't easy and I'm trying to get rid of this habit.

If you don't like people knowing too much about you, consider reading up on schizoid personality disorder. I'm not saying that you have it, but that particular foible is certainly reminiscent of it.

Thank you, it was an interesting read. Despite my enjoyment for introspection, I'm hesitant to do self-diagnosis based on a Wikipedia and a few articles around the Internet. But, as far as I can tell, this is just me being an introvert guy who spent most of his life in front of a computer instead of socializing. I'm, however, aware of my issues and slowly becoming a better person, or rather a person I'd like to be. In this particular case, I don't think that knowing the name of my supposed diagnosis would help me in any way.

I know I'm not particularly unique in having that sort of past, but it's comforting to hear someone else share these thoughts. Thank you.

I hate when a service normally sends emails from Service Name, but then once in a while they send an email from Firstname Lastname to make it look personal. It's not going to work, but it sure is annoying.

There’s a CRM of some sort that sends emails I’ve received that even mentions a nearby restaurant or point of interest in its emails. It’s trying so hard to be personal it’s laughable.

It's such a sinking feeling getting a paragraph in and realizing I've been duped by a bot. The worst is when I look up something, like whether I can feed my dog <X>, and I find a fairly long article about it. And as I read I notice that it's pretty light on specific information besides "always check with a vet!," and I click on the author and all of their other articles are top ten lists of crypto and erection pills, and I realize I've been had by a bot (or, worse and sadder, someone who day-in-day-out pumps out zero-information content).

You’re not scheduling interactions with this system, you’re just reminding yourself about the people you enjoyed talking to.

Nothing prevents you from talking to these people more frequently, this system seems more like a way to nudge you to remind you about conversations you forgot.

I dunno, I am very bad on the phone and an introvert but I found that even after a few years I have people who are genuinely happy to speak with me. I forced myself to call one of them last week and reconnected. Not my best friend but feels good

The forcing is weird, right? Why in the world does it take so much work to reach out to someone?

The obvious explanation would be fear of rejection.

Another story you could tell is fear of connection due to opportunity cost -- what if, among all the people you could connect with, this one isn't a great choice but will end up consuming a lot of your time?

But I think it's probably the first.

You wrote: <<The forcing is weird, right? Why in the world does it take so much work to reach out to someone?>>

No, forcing isn't weird if you have an introverted personality. I work with many people who have a strongly introverted personality. (I am a mixed bag!) They have taught me lots of social skills about how to interactive with people who have a different type of personality.

I am happy that the GP made the effort to make contact with "old friends". I hope the other side understood it was a big leap for you and made a good effort to be a friendly contact. I with GP luck in their effort to maintain contact while being an introverted person!

It's simpler than that. I don't feel the need to maintain relationships for my day to day well being, but I force myself to, because I don't want to die alone someday. But I also recognize that I'm an extreme hermit/introvert who is happy calling my dog my "SO", and will probably end up dying alone in a cabin in the woods someday, so it may all just be futile anyway.

I really am of two minds. My natural inclination until I was married was to stay in and hack computer music most of the time, work out when it seemed like a good time, go to coffee with people at work, and maybe go to a party once a week. But my favorite experiences are usually conversations. Mountains, oceans, etc. are nice too but really the most fun I have is in conversation. And yet I have to force myself to pursue it.

This is me 100%. Although I've found that when I do talk to folks and apologize for some of the shittiest shittiness, more often than not they don't even remember what I'm talking about. The lesson here, for me at least, is that I blow things way out of proportion. (This is not surprising news.)

Or, alternatively, they're giving you a polite "out" and enabling mutual forgetting. I've been on the wrong side of this dynamic too many times and I think that when the other person claims not to remember, most of the time they're telling the truth - of course they didn't ruminate on that-thing-you-did as much as you did - but sometimes, I think it's intentional amnesia to avoid the social overhead of addressing the event head-on.

I understand the feeling.

What I've learned in the last five years is contacting people has more upside than not contacting them.

The worst thing that can happen after contact is a return to disconnection and the other person maintaining the same opinion.

I moved back to my hometown 20 years after leaving. At one point I thought I should pull out my old yearbooks to try to remember who everyone was. I decided that was a bad idea. It would be better to learn who everyone is.

I'm on the same boat,however one things I learned with my kids is that you can apologize for what you feel embarrassed about.

I've resumed chatting with some people this way (even though they didn't feel there was a need)

ha ha - "my shittiness"

Well I definitely heard that. I have a thing the voices in my head periodically inflict on me that I call Embarrassment Day, where I spend the day remembering past incidents that I'm embarrassed about. Lots of fun.

The silver lining of course is that if you're embarrassed about things in the past, it means you've grown enough since then to be embarrassed about them. If all you want to do is double down on everything you did, either you were already perfect or you haven't grown at all since then.

Valid points, but this post is about organizing communication for professional development. The author mentions referrals and interesting code. Consider a professor and past grad students.

I don't want my wife to every meet my friends from my teenage and early 20s for exactly this reason.

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