When managing becomes too much

The pandemic has had a huge impact in most of our lives, changing the way we work, travel, shop or even amuse ourselves, forcing us to exercise restrain in our planning and limit our activities to just "the essentials". The first victim of this change has been the entertainment in public spaces: theaters, cinemas, concert halls, but also libraries and museums have been deemed non-essential all over the world and have been requested to limit access or to outright close their doors. In fact, when the pandemic provided a small respite at the end of September we made a quick trip to see some friends and would have liked to visit the wonderful library in town, but it was already limited to registered users only (and were not among them).

The second obvious victim to the social distancing policies has been all the errands that you ran "while you are in town". Many of us used to go into the city in the morning for work and come back home in the evening, but it was not all work: buying a couple of books in the bookstore, picking up the dry-cleaning, having lunch with a friend, having a quick session at the gym, these were all activities that happened "around work", but now that many have been asked to work from home all these things do not happen anymore. First of all, you do not need that much dry-cleaning; second, you are not going to sign up for a gym membership in your neighborhood; the books can be bought on line, and the friends... that is what I wanted to discuss with you today.

Photo: Theodor Moise from Pixabay

Friendship, like any other human relationship, has to be constantly curated and adapted to the conditions of all the participants, so if a friend breaks a leg instead of meeting at a coffee shop you might as well visit them at home and spare them the trouble of moving around with the cast. Similarly, if someone in your Wednesday poker club goes on vacation for three weeks it is self implicit that they will regain their seat at the table the moment they come back. But how to curate your friendships when the circumstances of life have changed so dramatically? In BP times (before the pandemic) it was very easy to meet someone for lunch or to drop by briefly on your way home: for a start you were already dressed for the street, and then your mindset was clearly business/social. Now with the pandemic we do not even necessarily get properly dressed every day so paying someone a visit (in case it is allowed) would mean putting the time to be presentable. Besides, the trip to their home would add to the time cost of the visit: coming back from work it would have been a small detour on an already lengthy commute, but now you have to account all the time to the visit. The result is that most of us do not have the time to properly maintain as many friendships was we used to, and that is understandable, but there has to be a sensible way to deal with the lack of time.

A couple of days ago I ran into this article on the Washington Post detailing the problems many people had to keep their social circles alive, and how many people were expecting to continue a more restricted social life even after pandemic goes away because their former rhythm was just too much. However, I was disturbed by the title ("The pandemic is showing us which friendships are worth keeping") and some opinions in it that talked about friends as if they were a portfolio of assets that you could acquire, profit from, and eventually discard, in what looked to me like an outrageous objectification of people fringing on Machiavellian.

I understand that the time is limited and the effort you can put at keeping friend is even more constrained under the current COVID-19 restrictions, but the measuring stick to decide whether to keep a friendship or let it go cannot be its usefulness, because that completely disregards other emotional factors including those of the counterpart. In fact, I think that the concept of ending a friendship that you cannot maintain is already unsettling. If you get in a fight with a friend or find irreconcilable differences, it is understandable that you grow apart, but the lack of time should not be a legitimate cause. In the end, most friendships only require intermittent attention, so it is very easy to cut back on your time investment by simply accepting some invitations and not others. But what would you do if a "former" friend showed up at your doorstep asking to spend the night? Would you argue that you are not close enough to justifying getting the foldaway bed out of the cabinet? Isn't that a bit inhumane, a bit objectifying?

Unfortunately, this is not the first time I hear about "managing your friends". Some weeks ago my middle brother Jack mentioned that they were on the friendship market for a couple from out of town, because their circle was getting too provincial, and at the time I laughed it out and accused him of having "manage-itis", being the director of an entertainment venue he was so focused on the management mindset that he had started managing his friends too. Now I see that not only he was serious about it, but that other people doing it too. It is like trying to become friends with someone because they always manage to get dinner reservations in this famous restaurant. It saddens me profoundly.

So I leave you today with the thought that some ideas, even if logically justifiable, can be manipulative and cruel. Whenever presented with such a situation, please think about how the counterpart would feel, and consider that nothing forces you to pick up a ringing phone. Enjoy your evening.