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I found this to be the case as well. In my experience: it's allowed me to focus all of my emotional energy on the 5-8 actual close relationships that I have, r

by eckza 8y ago

I found this to be the case as well. In my experience: it's allowed me to focus all of my emotional energy on the 5-8 actual close relationships that I have, rather than burning myself out living like some kind of small-time celebrity with an audience of hundreds of casual acquaintances that expect me to like posts and respond to messages at their beck and call.

baroffoos 8y ago
I feel like I have fallen in to this trap. I have become fairly well known on an IM platform just by creating/running a lot of group chats and I get loads of people PMing me wanting to chat so I end up having hundreds of small conversations with people I don't know rather than spending a lot of time with a few people I care about. But I also don't want to seem rude and ignore everyone.
- eckza 8y ago
  I was like you, once. I helped run a hobbyist group on Facebook with ~15,000 members. I made myself as available to everyone as possible, frequently ignoring my wife actual friends to help random strangers over Messenger. Hours and hours and hours of my life burnt, wasted, gone. All for the sake of "helping grow the sport". One day, I just quit. Left everyone in the lurch, with no explanation. It was a huge turning point in my personal life. My mental health improved immediately - and all of a sudden, I had so much more time and emotional energy for the things in my life that I really, truly cared about. I've kept in touch with a handful of people that I was close to. My new policy is, "if I need to hear from you, you'll know because you have my phone number". The rest of them are still there, arguing about clipless vs flat pedals, and chromoly vs carbon fiber, and everything else, as if I'd never left - or showed up in the first place. More likely than not, they'll forget about you just as casually as they came into contact with you. Ask yourself if it would REALLY bother you to never hear from them again. In my case, it didn't; and I know for a fact that it really didn't bother them to go for long periods of time without hearing from me, too. It's okay to let acquaintances be acquaintances. You owe them exactly as much as they owe you - in the case of these people, it's "pretty much nothing" - in the case of the people who are a major part of your actual life, it's "a hell of a lot".

by eckza 8y ago

baroffoos 8y ago

I feel like I have fallen in to this trap. I have become fairly well known on an IM platform just by creating/running a lot of group chats and I get loads of people PMing me wanting to chat so I end up having hundreds of small conversations with people I don't know rather than spending a lot of time with a few people I care about. But I also don't want to seem rude and ignore everyone.

eckza 8y ago
I was like you, once. I helped run a hobbyist group on Facebook with ~15,000 members. I made myself as available to everyone as possible, frequently ignoring my wife actual friends to help random strangers over Messenger. Hours and hours and hours of my life burnt, wasted, gone. All for the sake of "helping grow the sport". One day, I just quit. Left everyone in the lurch, with no explanation. It was a huge turning point in my personal life. My mental health improved immediately - and all of a sudden, I had so much more time and emotional energy for the things in my life that I really, truly cared about. I've kept in touch with a handful of people that I was close to. My new policy is, "if I need to hear from you, you'll know because you have my phone number". The rest of them are still there, arguing about clipless vs flat pedals, and chromoly vs carbon fiber, and everything else, as if I'd never left - or showed up in the first place. More likely than not, they'll forget about you just as casually as they came into contact with you. Ask yourself if it would REALLY bother you to never hear from them again. In my case, it didn't; and I know for a fact that it really didn't bother them to go for long periods of time without hearing from me, too. It's okay to let acquaintances be acquaintances. You owe them exactly as much as they owe you - in the case of these people, it's "pretty much nothing" - in the case of the people who are a major part of your actual life, it's "a hell of a lot".