Feeling a bit down? A bit isolated? A bit lonely?
And you’ve no idea why, hey? It really shouldn’t be the case. You’re investing in relationships like it’s going out of fashion:
- You’ve got 4995 folk connected to you on Facebook.
- Your Twitter follow count is in the low thousands.
- You have a little black book that’s FULL to bursting with digits and names and contacts.
- You have a shoebox full of business cards.
Congratulations.
You give all these folk the time they need – a smiley here, a retweet there. “You Like This”. You send a bit of fanmail and you get all giddy when Ashton Kutcher @replies you.
But who are your friends?
(Not the kind of friends who say “ZOMG ROFL LOL“. Not the kind of friends who say “you rock!” The kind of friends who say “tell me more, I care” or “that was a stupid thing to do, but I still love you.”)
If you’re hanging out with the cool kids online, or giving each person a blink of an eye’s worth of attention, or climbing the greasy soiled rungs of the ladder of arrivisme, then do something different this weekend.
This weekend, look after your friends.
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Excellent point. There’s a big difference between acquaintances and friends.
I loved finding this post — it is EXACTLY what I talk about in my upcoming book of the same title. We don’t have “relationships” any more in the truest sense…we let technology do the work for us. It’s particularly true in business and knowing how to form, develop and nurture strong relationships is a major strategic differentiator.
To learn more or download a free chapter, visit http://www.corinnegregory.com/free-chapter. Happy reading!
Eh.. nice sentiments, but not quite.
The reason we don’t have relationships anymore is because we neither need nor desire them. Everything we might have once relied on a social circle for can now be bought as a service given you have the cash. Services are convienient! Services are always available when we need them, as long as your subscription includes what you need. We no longer need people, so then we quickly grew to not want them, either. REAL relationships are riddled with emotions, laughter, crying, histories, baggage, success, failure, and in general a lot of messy emotional bullshit everybody nowadays calls ‘drama’. Drama makes good television, but nobody has the patience or time, or need to tolerate it anymore. Even though we all have ‘drama’. We’ve gotten to the point of becoming compleatly impatient with what makes us humuman.
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