Stay Connected with the People Who Matter Most

Most people now have large networks of people that they know. There may be family, friends, coworkers, acquaintances (or friends of friends), professional connections, and so on.

Our networks get larger and larger, but also more and more superficial. We know more and more people, but we know less and less about them.

Through the years, I find that it’s very easy to lose the connections that were actually the most important to our lives. If given enough time, the ties get weaker and weaker, to the point where they can break off after a certain point.

Of course, if you had a strong enough connection with someone, you should always have some ability to reconnect and continue your bond or friendship.

Today, I want you to consider if there are people with who you are gradually losing connection but who are worth keeping up with. Just because one of you moved or changed jobs does not mean that you cannot keep in contact.

Some simple ways to maintain a connection are email, social media, messaging, or phone calls. Of course, there are even letters or postcards.

What I have found is that staying connected is a two-way street. You may try to stay in touch with someone, but perhaps they don’t make much of an effort. Perhaps they are content to allow some of their relationships to fade away with time. This can be difficult, of course, but you can only do your part to try to keep up with relationships that are important to you.

Who have you lost touch with that made a big impact on your life? Is there someone you would like to reconnect with?

In some cases, perhaps you actually had a problem with someone. You can ask whether that problem is worth losing contact over. Sometimes it may be, but in other cases, perhaps with time, you have seen that the issue was not major enough to hold a grudge over. It may be time to make amends and reconnect.

What I have found is that good friends are worth keeping in contact with. Close family is also worth keeping in contact with. Sometimes certain bonds may not be as strong as you would like – of course, in those cases, working on continuing to develop those bonds and friendships is worth it.

It’s easy to make excuses - but that’s all they are, excuses. We all have a few moments here and there to send an email, a message, or even make a phone call. No one is so busy that they can’t periodically check in on someone important to their lives.

You may be interested to learn that the author of The Top 5 Regrets of the Dying (read a useful summary on her website here), Bronnie Ware, actually identified this as one of the common regrets people had when they were dying:

“I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends.”

Some of my best friendships go back to middle school and high school. Unfortunately, with three of my closest friends, they ended up moving away during high school, and I never kept in touch with them after this. I did manage to find one of them on social media, but the other two I have never heard from again.

Sometimes we don’t realize the value of certain relationships until it is too late and we have lost them.

Try to think of someone worth reconnecting with (or building a deeper connection with) in your life. Consider this:

• Is this someone you love?

• Is this someone who supported you during a difficult time?

• Is this someone who you grew up with, and you were there for each other?

• Is this someone that you miss?

• Is this someone who you regret having fought with over issues that now seem trivial?

• Is this a friend or family member (e.g., cousin or aunt) who felt more like a sibling or second parent?

• Is this someone who you “clicked” with or connected with immediately when you met them?

Today, think back to the important people in your life. Is there someone you haven’t talked to in a long time that was a good friend or who played an important role in your life? Consider trying to get in touch again. They may be happy and excited to hear from you.

What Actually Guides Human Behavior? (It’s Not Reason)

Quite often, I hear people make predictions that people will behave in a certain way. Just today, I heard this on the radio:

“There is no reason kids shouldn’t be allowed to trick-or-treat even with Covid-19 being a concern. The parents need to make sure they wash their hands. And the people who give the candy need to make sure they keep their distance. If they do these things, we won’t have any problems.”

I use this example not to take a side but to shine a light on widespread problems in our thinking.

Essentially, to expect reasonable and rational behavior is itself irrational.

From what I have seen, this is the order of what actually guides human behavior:

1. Survival

2. Self-interest

3. Close relationships

4. Emotion, feelings, and intuition

5. Beliefs (e.g., religion, ethics, ideologies, politics)

6. Reason

I have met many people who are indeed quite reasonable. They work through problems in their lives methodically. But most people, most of the time, are not guided primarily by their reason. Let’s discuss these principles a bit more deeply.

Survival

The idea of survival guiding human behavior should not be difficult to understand. When your needs are not met, you will do anything to survive.

Self-interest

This should not be a shock either – we are the star of our own lives. So naturally, our focus is often on making decisions that make us happy and successful.

Close Relationships

The people closest to us in our lives are quite important to us. So often, we will make decisions that help them, or at least consider them.

Emotion, Feelings, and Intuition

Emotions, feelings, and intuition help provide us with a shortcut to make decisions effectively and efficiently much of the time. If my boss at work asks me to spit on someone he does not like, I do not need to evaluate if this falls in line with my beliefs or if this is a rational thing to do. My gut or my feelings immediately make me disgusted at the thought.

Of course, sometimes, our emotions can overwhelm us and cause us to make poor decisions. Nonetheless, they still tend to guide our actions.

Beliefs

After all the prior principles guiding our human behavior, we have our belief systems. This does not always mean religion. I can believe in certain ethical practices, or I may believe that everyone has certain rights. If none of the prior principles mentioned have led us to behave a certain way, then our belief systems will help us decide what to do.

Some people are highly religious or believe strongly in certain values or ideas, and they may aim to make this principle the primary guiding force of their lives.

Reason

Reason is last for a reason. It takes a lot of work to reason properly. If you work hard at it and fail, you may come to an unreasonable conclusion and make a bad decision. Even if you reason correctly, you may get unlucky somehow, and the outcomes of your decision may still lead to negative consequences. Otherwise, if part of your plan involves convincing other people that your reasoning is correct, you may fail to convince them even if your reasoning is correct.

So reason carries its risks. Get it wrong, and you have wasted your time. Get it right, and it still may backfire on you. Most people, most of the time, do not find good reasons to employ reason. They may not feel competent enough to think rationally or reasonably, it may be too much work, or they may have had bad experiences trying to use reason. They may have given up on it. Also, real-life has so many variables that it can be too complicated to reason through perfectly. Rather than bother to try, many of us prefer to use feelings or emotions to guide us.

We like to think that we are rational and reasonable, but the evidence does not seem to support this.

The former conclusion stands. Most people, most of the time, are not basing their decisions on reason. We cannot expect most people to behave reasonably. If we do, then we are the ones who are thinking unreasonably.

Any time I hear phrases such as “If people do this….” I already know that we are not going to be happy with the results. It isn’t easy to control or predict what a large group of people will do. Most “experts” whose job it is to predict the stock market actually fail at it. This is their job – this is how they earn their living, and they cannot predict where the stock market will go. Part of this is because they cannot predict the human behavior that affects the market.

You may be able to predict or even control what a small group of people will do. But beyond this, it seems to be a fool’s game.

Instead of guiding everyone into perfect actions or expecting them to behave perfectly rationally, we should take advantage of this knowledge that there will be unreasonable behaviors and imperfect actions everywhere we go.

How can we do this? Here are a few examples.

I am very good at avoiding car accidents because I assume that people will drive in erratic ways. I assume that they may get distracted and struggle to stay in their own lane. I have lived in places where Stop signs and traffic lights were just viewed as suggestions, so I got used to checking for traffic and pedestrians at every intersection. Ironically, assuming that perfection will happen tends to give us poor results and may result in more accidents.

As another example, when I want to succeed at something, I have backup plans. Many people end up working outside of the field that they trained for. In my case, I was studying to be a psychologist, but I changed paths and ended up becoming an author who writes about self-development, psychology, and other related themes. Fortunately, my psychology background was a great asset for this. If you are pursuing a degree, ask yourself if it will be useful for only one thing, or can you use it to succeed in various fields?

Another way to stop assuming that things will work out perfectly is to reconsider your timelines for important projects. I had a boss who once said:

“Give me your timeline. That way, I can double it in my mind. When you make up your timelines, you tend to expect things to work out perfectly, but they rarely do. We need to account for all of the problems you’ll have that we can’t predict right now.”

You can try this too. If you expect things to take a certain amount of time (usually assuming that things will work out perfectly), then double that in your mind, and that may be the true timeline.

When I see that people have assumed perfection, I expect that things will go wrong. For situations that require everyone to behave perfectly and orderly, I will avoid them and be extra cautious, waiting for something to go wrong, as it often does.

Of course, the exception here is that some people are highly trained or skilled to deal with certain scenarios. In some professions, people may operate at seemingly perfect levels to get the job done.

However, we cannot expect such a high level of rational behavior from most people, most of the time.

Learn this lesson that people do not usually make decisions based on reason, see the lack of reason around you, and use this understanding to make better decisions.

Think of Death to Live More Consciously

For someone who is 35 years old, I think of my own death quite often. I am very healthy, so poor health is not the reason for this. I am also not depressed, so please do not be concerned in that way either.

I also consider that for anyone important in my life, they may perish at any time. I don’t let this make me fearful, but I realize that this is the truth. Since much of my way of life is to pursue the truth, I think we need to acknowledge that life can be taken from us at any moment. We are not in control of when or how it will happen. We can eat well, exercise, and maintain our health to the best of our abilities, but this does not free us from the possibility of sudden illness, an accident, or senseless violence.

I am a highly optimistic person, and so the last thing I want to do is make someone fear that death is coming for them and their loved ones any time soon. I want us to accept that it can happen and use this for our personal betterment, rather than as something to become anxious or depressed about. There is no reason to expect death to come soon for many of us. Yet, because there is no reason to expect this to happen, our lives are often out of balance. We may even live as if we will never die, which of course, is false.

Many people prioritize work, or money, or even things above their loved ones. Still, if we considered even for a moment that a loved one may not be there tomorrow, then surely we would be awakened to the true value of our relationships with family and close friends.

Sometimes I think today could be my last day alive. If this were the case, what would I do? As strange as it is, I often find myself figuring out that I would live my life as an ordinary person, fulfilling my ordinary obligations. I would pursue a good meal, spend time with my wife, write my Thought post (as I’m doing now), and reflect on my life and the nature of society and its problems, as I do regularly. I would also try to help whoever I could.

Surely, if I knew I was going to die today, I would probably feel the need to reflect on whether my life had been worth it – whether I accomplished what I wanted to. But what is the point in waiting for death to think of this? Think of it right now. Are you accomplishing what you had hoped? Are you on the path you had hoped? Are you living up to your own standards? Forget the standards of everyone else for a moment.

If we wait until death to think and reflect on our lives, we are perhaps waiting until death to think. Is this the reality we want for ourselves? If nothing else, we should reflect on what we find to be truly important during our lives. If it is love, we should be loving, rather than just wanting others to love us. If it is happiness, we should be spreading it rather than just wishing to feel it. If it is wisdom, we should be the student for many years and then spread our wisdom to life’s students. What value do we hold so strongly that we should be giving it to others happily, rather than just wishing to accumulate it for ourselves?

We must seriously consider our own death to live truly. Understand that your life is limited, the lives of your parents are limited, even the lives of your children are limited. All lives are limited. There is only so much time to do what we wanted, find love, express our love, accomplish something, make our small impact in this world in our own way, and stand up for whatever it is that we believe in. But if we never thought about what we believed or what we wanted, how would we truly pursue it? And how would we accomplish it?

We have to respect that death is ultimately coming for us all. When we have a conversation with anyone, we should sometimes think – this may be the last time I have the chance to speak with this person. Before we get another chance, that person may die, or I may die.

Such thoughts are not meant to traumatize us or make us fearful or agoraphobic. The point is to realize that many of us are living life trivially. We are not present. We see our loved ones as just background noise, as mouths to feed, as wanting to discuss their own boring lives with us, etc. We form barriers between us with our phones, televisions, and other screens. In time, we become strangers in the same house, or eventually, maybe strangers who live in different houses who realize they never really knew each other.

It seems that many of us are afraid to live. It’s easier to follow the lives and dramas in the news media and television shows than to discover and pursue our own truthful life path. We become obsessive about following fake lives on television screens, celebrities, and our friends’ lives rather than forming our own life worth living.

We live in an age when it is more possible to create the life you want to live than at any point in history, but this does not necessarily make it easy. Just as we have opened up so many fruitful paths, we have also opened up many harmful and counterproductive options. The path toward truth and meaning in our lives is one we must commit to, or there will be plenty of distractions along the way to take us off course.

So this is why I find it valuable, and I’m eternally grateful for the simple reminder that I’m going to die. Everyone I know is going to die. These are statements I view positively, as they always help me stay on the right track in my life.

This simple reminder forces me to value people first, always. This is the world I want to live in, where we put people first. Ultimately, every action you perform every day should represent the world you want to live in. I always keep in mind that whoever I am interacting with is a real person first, and second, they are whatever they appear to be.

For example, for any stranger you may see on the streets, think: This is a person first, that happens to be a successful businessperson. This is a person first that happens to be skating in the middle of the street. Or this is a person first, who happens to be homeless and asking for food. Our value comes from being a person first, not from our secondary characteristics. And this is the way it is with all life, actually. Life has value in itself, not because of what temporary qualities it appears to have (e.g., beauty, success, power).

Whenever someone calls me or emails me and needs to talk, I do my best to be there. If it’s family, I drop what I’m doing and do my best to help, or listen, or provide whatever it is they may need. If it’s one of my readers with a problem, I often do my best to help them see better pathways in their life. I never aim to tell someone what to do with their life. I hope to get them to see better pathways that they could explore.

At one point, I was so fixated on my business and my work that I put that first for many years. Now, I don’t. Now, I see that my work is meant to be just an extension of my whole life. My whole life’s work is about helping people. So doing that is important, and I aim to listen to people deeply and help them however I can. If it means setting aside my work for a few minutes, or in some cases longer, so be it.

What point is there in me trying to spread my thoughts if I am not living by them? This is another realization you may come to when keeping death in mind. Are you truly living by what you find to be most important? Are you telling your kid to tell the truth, then you lie to everyone all day at your work and to your spouse? Are you telling your friends to follow their passion but choosing money first in your life every time?

The biggest lie most of us face every day is that we don’t acknowledge the simple fact of our own mortality and the mortality of every person we will cross paths with today. Keep this in mind. If you see 100 people or more today, there is a fair chance at least one of those people you crossed paths with will not be alive in 365 days.

To pursue truth in our lives, we must acknowledge our mortality, and this will help us always to make sure we are on the path to valuing what is truly most valuable in our lives and being congruent with ourselves (being, thinking, saying, and doing in a way that is in alignment). This will also help us to be more present. If you keep in mind the temporariness of life, you will be motivated to get the most from every moment and not take any of it for granted.