The Cost Of Losing People

When you add up everyone that is listed as one of your friends on your different social media profiles - Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, TikTok - you could have tens of thousands of people that you supposedly know. For a simple equation, let’s pretend you have 10,000 of these “friends” and you reach out to just one of them a day. It would take you 27 years to come full circle.

Can you really say all these people are your friends? Look through your listed friends on these sites and pick out those you actually know and interact with regularly, like old friends and your relatives. It’s likely the rest are people you may have interacted with online once or maybe they’re the people you worked with ten years ago. But how often do you really interact now for more than a “like?”

It used to be that people could simply lose touch. It wasn’t that long ago that you’d meet someone somewhere - maybe a plane, a conference, a restaurant. If there wasn’t a connection, that was all there was to your interaction with that person. However, today we are so globally connected in so many formats that even the smallest real-world interaction can lead to an uptick in followers and a new “friend.” The people that would have been a passing ship in the night are crew members on board with us.

This isn’t just an annoyance sometimes. It can quickly become overwhelming in its volume.

One reason for this is the assumption that there’s intimacy of any kind in each and every online connection. A person might pop into your mind and you immediately think about where you’re connected online. Suddenly, there’s a sense that you have to maintain a full relationship, even when the connection you share is based on sometimes just one meeting, not shared interests. Then there is an obligation to nurture a relationship that isn’t founded on anything but false obligation. Every now and then one of you might comment to the other about how wonderful it would be to get together and catch up. Now you have a social contract with this person.

If you are, you need to adopt the following sentence as your mantra: it is okay to lose touch with people.

As you learn about your online contacts, if you find yourself dreading their comments on your posts or messages they send, it’s okay to disconnect and lose touch. If you are sick of seeing their endless stream of political rants, it’s okay to move on and lose touch. If you simply want to weed out the acquaintances you have so you only see your real-life friends and family on your feeds, go ahead and lose touch!

There’s a real possibility of losing out on the real connections in your life because so much time is spent keeping up with the artificial ones. There are some people in your life that have been there in the past, are there currently and will be there hopefully for many years to come. The team at HOLSTEE says “Life comes down to the people you meet and the things you create together.” By collecting and hoarding your relationships online, you lose out on the feeling of meaning behind your real relationships.

A great analogy and test for your online relationships to see whether you should maintain them is Guy Kawaski’s “Shopping Center Test.” Think about someone you’ve recently interviewed or had pitch to you or someone you’ve had some kind of minimal social contact you’ve had recently. If you were in a large shopping center or big box store or shopping mall and you saw them across the food court or in a store you were passing, would you go out of your way to stop and say hi and have a conversation? Whatever the answer is, it tells you what type of social interaction or relationship parameters to maintain online. And the result of that test may change even for the same person as you gather more information. You can always decide how important the relationship is to you and decide from there to invest your precious time and energy into maintaining it or go on and lose touch.

We can all increase our ability to invest in relationships - both personal and professional - when we let ourselves be free of the obligations we feel from less important relationships. Allow yourself to devote your time and mental energy to the people who deserve it and let yourself lose touch with the rest.