I’m always amazed by how little there is to say to people who you haven’t seen for a while, compared to those you see every day. Yes, if it has been years, and they were a good friend, there are the major events of the intervening time to catch up on, but a month, or two months seems to be a low point on the conversation scale.

When you see someone every day, they are closely entwined with your life. Their trials are, to some extent, your trials, as are yours to them; you discuss the things that annoyed you in the office, or out collecting data, or washing the dishes, and somehow these little things are enough to keep you amused for hours.

To the middlingly frequent acquaintance, though, the characters in these daily stories are of little importance and no interest, and there have been few major excitements since your last meeting, so somehow the conversation dries up before you’ve been talking for half an hour, leaving you to find a new activity to produce talking points for later, or go your separate ways.

Perhaps that is why keeping in touch with people is so difficult. After a while, the effort of maintaining contact begins to feel too high for the short conversations that you have, and you drift apart, waiting for the big event to tell them about.

So I say this, here and now, to all of my friends and family. I am sorry, I did not mean to go silent on you; to drift off into the realms of obscurity in your memory, to exist as nothing more than an anecdote of earlier years. If you put in the effort, I’ll put in the effort, and if that means me becoming passionately invested in the problems of your colleague’s son’s girlfriend’s dog, so much the better.

Last modified on 2025-06-11