Staying Connected In the Digital Landscape

I am writing this due to the fact that I am horrible at keeping in touch with all of the people in my life but I am trying to get better with it. So this is acting as a hard reminder to do just this, make it a point to reach out to the people in my life. Most of the reason why I don’t stay connected with people, especially with people I know from the electronic music scene is that I assume they are busy so I don’t want to bother them or I question, how connected am I really, and then there of course is that feeling that hey, maybe they don’t want to hear from me. This would also apply to other business contacts. The funny thing with connections made through business deals with, how authentic are all of those relationships. There is always that thought that we are just befriending people in order to gain profit. I have to believe others feel the same way here. However, the more I think about it I truly believe that we are social creatures that need human interaction and that random reach outs to people we are aquatinted with are very important.

I am even guilty of not keeping in contact with my family members. Here is my excuse, I am a very distracted person, I have my daily routines and anything that breaks that up to me is a negative thing, I know, it’s bad. People just calling without scheduling a call with me, depending on who it is, annoys me in some way. I am sure there is some root cause to this manic behavior but hey, it’s me, could be all of those years being an agent that made me jaded, but I’ll just continue to hide behind the I’m from NY excuse.

I write this because online I have hundreds of people I follow and thousands that follow me, this is on all platforms as well, most of these people I don’t even really know or maybe I have had a connection with once in my life but there isn’t enough time to have a true connection.

So how can we improve this? What if we put on our to-do list to write a personal message to one person per social network to keep connected with the people we are connected with? Then on top of that, maybe make a rule if you don’t know that person to remove them from your list, unless, of course, you have a lot of people you know in common, then you should try to attempt to have a deeper relationship with that person as the probability to have a connection is higher due to fact you are connected with so many others.

This really came up as I was looking for a new full-time day job, I reached out to my LinkedIn network via a post and wow I got zero responses. When I reached out to coworkers of course I got positive responses since those connections were built over years but the others, it was crickets.

I feel if we all did a better job of keeping in contact with all of the people in our lives we would do much better in life. It is human nature to help those we are constantly in contact with. For example, if one of our high school buddies hit us up and they were looking for a job we would stop what we were doing and help them. This is due to the fact that we built a true connection with those people in high school due to all of that time hanging out in those hallways and house parties. Funny though that many of us have lost touch with even those people.

I know people that are amazing at this whole keeping in touch thing. At least once a month I have people who reach out via text or on socials just with a simple, hey man hope your doing good and that is that, and I do get that human connection feeling so it does work. Now do I respond? Not always…if I am really busy with things I won’t as I fear that conversation will last 30-60 min and that would set me back in my day – but what they did served its purpose so that person should keep it going. Eventually, usually in the evening hours, I’ll give them a message back so it is effective.

So let’s come up with a general script that can be used for all of our social connections out there. Yes, I am calling it a script so it is easier to do, if we make it more of a task it is easier to take action on. Here we go: “Hey, was just scrolling through and saw your name and figured I would say hello, I truly hope all is well, no need to respond, just saying hey” With this there is a connection, but no forced need for a response so it is truly casual and if a response comes of this then respond on your own time, it is messaging, not a phone call or text message that usually requires more of an instant response.

Remember we aren’t doing this because we are hoping to rekindle a connection in order to profit or something but we are doing this to rekindle a human connection as we all need this in our lives.

If we all subscribe to this activity the benefits of these actions are that if you do indeed lose a job and when you post that post you might actually get a response or many responses with actual help that you need at that moment.

So let’s take this pledge, bring up your Todoist app or whatever manages your life and write in a daily reminder to “reach out to your socials” and copy and paste your message to that random person and keep it going. Let’s see how this effort helps our mental health and know we are helping those people as well this is indeed an act of kindness and I know you are with me that we all need more of that in our lives.

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Check Out My Substack – a lot of the same, just there