[jkirsteins]

There seems to be a non-fringe sentiment that "this is pretending to care" or "you can't automate friendship", etc.

I see where it's coming from, and I agree to some extent - I wouldn't want to be contacted "for the sake of it". Feeling like it's a chore for the other person that they have to get through, in the hopes of some (maybe financial?) reward at the end of it.

However, I think this approach warrants some defense against the "I would purposefully avoid people like this" reaction.

Using myself as an example - I have considered doing something similar, and I liked the article a lot. And it's not because I "want to hack some serendipity", but because I genuinly have a hard time finding enough time for all the things that matter in life. Having a system in place doesn't mean it's fake, it means you are prioritizing this aspect of your life (i.e. you care enough) and are finding ways to fit it into everything else you have going on.

In a normal workday I spend ~9 hours in "work mode". I want to fit in ~1-2h of running every day to counteract my sedentary lifestyle. I need to spend some quality time with the immediate family (wife and kids) - let's say ~2 hours. And there are additional little everyday tasks that need to happen every day - shopping, helping kids with their homework, doing the dishes, etc.

How much time does this leave to socialize? I will occasionally think of some friend or another, and miss them. But I won't have time to reach out in the moment. And then - e.g. when the weekend comes - who do I reach out to? Do I spend every saturday just calling everybody in a row?

I enjoy catching up with my friends, but it takes a lot of energy for me. I can't feasibly reach out to everybody in a given weekend - it would leave me completely drained, and exhausted.

So I prioritize. I try to reach out to people I haven't spoken to in a longer time period. Or people I know have had some life event happen recently, etc. I try to find a way to keep in touch with most people, instead of just a few of them.

But here's my issue - it's hard to remember how to schedule who to get in touch with, and when. "Did I last talk to X 1 week or 2 weeks ago? Should I get in touch with Y instead?" etc.

Now, I could start taking paper notes, or look at my calendar, etc. But at this point I'm setting up some mental system to help me with the scheduling. Which is basically just a different (possibly less efficient) flavor of what's described in the article.

Now, maybe I'm projecting, and this doesn't apply to many others. But please consider - if you feel someone in your life is reaching out through automated means - that they might really care, and just have a hard time figuring out how to do it otherwise. If scheduling catch ups comes naturally to you, it might not to others.

(and I know the article mentions "serendipity" and is not necessarily about catching up with close friends. I think it works well for both)

[MrYellowP]

> but because I genuinely have a hard time finding enough time for all the things that matter in life.

Mate. It takes seconds to send a simple text message/mail "Hey, how're you doing?" while sitting on the toilet.

Everyone sits on the toilet, quite regularly.

[greyman]

But this doesn't work for contacts I do not reach regularly... I just forget about them when I don't reach them at all for some longer time.

[3qz]

That’s good! It means people who aren’t actually part of your busy life will get pruned out, and you’ll be left with more time to deal with people who actually matter.

[WickyNilliams]

This is a weird take.

I have friends I've known for decades, some of whom have moved to different cities, different countries, different continents even. I don't talk to them regularly - we all have our lives and it's easy to get caught up. It's not that these people don't matter, just that we're not as close - physically or otherwise - as we used to be. Many of these people, if we did meet again in person, we could pick up exactly where we were as if I'd only seen them yesterday.

I don't use a system like this. But it's bizarre to say that just because someone hasn't spoken in a while that they don't actually matter

[terafo]

Shit happens, you might have crunch at work for some time and spend much less time on social activities in that period, which means that you loose contacts with anyone but close friends. It requires conscious effort to leave that state. And there are different types of social connections, there are those where not much happens for some time, but then in very short period of time A LOT happens. That is the case for some of my friends that don't live in my city.

[trowawee]

The thing about parsing your social network down to just a tiny group of close friends is A) it makes it harder to develop more close friends, since friendship tends to work like a funnel where you start out shallow and become better friends through time/exposure, and B) eventually you start to lose friends, whether to physical distance, falling out, life events, and eventually death, and if you only have a tiny group, it's easy for the bottom to fall out of your friend group entirely.

I've watched this happen with a lot of older adults I know, which is one of the reasons I've deliberately made some efforts to keep a pool of shallow friendships. Some of them have already deepened into actual friends, some fall off and that's ok, because that's kind of the point. Casting a wider net is part of a strategy to not end up in my later years with 0-2 total friends in my life.