Dot Complicated: Untangling Our Wired Lives (10 page)

Paying attention to some people and not others doesn’t mean you’re being dismissive or snooty. It just reflects a hard fact: there are limits on the number of people we can possibly pay attention to or cultivate a relationship with. Some scientists even believe that the number of people with whom we can maintain stable social relationships might be limited naturally by our brains. Robin Dunbar, a famous professor of evolutionary anthropology, has theorized that our minds are only really capable of forming meaningful relationships with a maximum of about a hundred and fifty people, a figure known today as “Dunbar’s number.” Whether that’s true or not, it’s safe to assume that we can’t be real friends with everyone.

One of the strangest things about human psychology is that sometimes we prioritize our relationships in strange ways, and that affects how we allocate our attention. Think about this fact for a moment: people feel the most pressure to pay back their financial debts to the people they are least close to, and conversely, we feel most comfortable letting debts slide with people we are close to and know we’ll see again in the future. Psychologists were able to correctly predict the nature of a friendship by observing the speed of repayment.

Perhaps this helps explain why we feel the most pressure to respond to the e-mails of people we don’t really know, and we let letters from our relatives fester in our in-boxes. When a work colleague or casual acquaintance writes an e-mail that we ignore, we feel the pressure to pay back the attention debt we incurred when that person sent the e-mail. But if a friend lends an e-mail’s worth of time, we may not feel that same pressure to return the favor so quickly, because we know we’ll have the opportunity to connect with them in person soon.

While we were working together at Facebook, my brother Mark would always respond whenever his girlfriend, Priscilla (now his wife), called him. No matter what he was doing, Mark prioritized his attention to her over anyone else. Brent and I have taken a similar approach, and no matter how busy I am, if I see “Brentie” come up on my phone, I do my best to answer it. If my attention is the most precious thing I can give someone, then surely nobody is more worthy of my attention than my family.

Technological improvements have expanded the ways people can both give and receive attention, but when too many demands are placed on our attention, it can make life difficult and strain our personal relationships with those who are most important to us.

When deciding whom to pay attention to, we now need to understand the difference between our friends and our “friends.” It’s hard to remember now, but there was a time when “friend” was still only a noun and not yet a verb. Back then, our friends were the people closest to us, whom we hung out with regularly, drank with, and confided in. The era of Facebook and social networking changed all that. Now, a “friend” can include anyone from a best friend to a secret nemesis, a work colleague, a distant relative, a neighbor’s dog, and Kim Kardashian.

Not only that but different methods of communicating make varying demands on our attention. If someone, somehow, manages to handwrite a letter or send a gift, we have a few days to acknowledge it. A phone call is less demanding than a video chat, because we can do other things and don’t have to constantly readjust our hair during the call. An in-person chat with our cell phone turned off is the highest level of attention we can pay to someone.

Thinking of our limited supply of daily attention as a kind of currency may help us prioritize our responses to people. We feel a lot of pressure to respond to all the e-mails in our in-boxes, to get to that mythical unicorn of “in-box zero,” because otherwise, it feels as if we have debts hanging over our heads. There are even services that take the conceptual value of attention quite literally and charge the senders of commercial e-mail a premium. This is a pretty big shift for technology companies. In the early days of social networking, every service tried to encourage a social land grab and amass as many friends as possible in a kind of giant popularity contest. As people are now becoming oversaturated with online relationships, the pendulum is swinging back and new services are starting to cater to those who would rather be connected to fewer people whom they truly know and care about. One example is Path, the social network that limits your maximum number of friends to 150, and Couple, an app for, well, couples.

In the end, we have to focus on the people who matter most to us.

This year for my mom’s birthday, we went away to a spa together for two days. Over dinner, we toasted to a great trip, but most important, we toasted our promise to one another that even in this age of constant distraction and ever-busier lives, we would always find the time to celebrate and give each other our undivided attention. It’s a promise I hope to keep for many years to come.

Going Out Alone—with Friends

It’s clear that we need to seek out tech–life balance and be mindful of where we’re paying attention, but what, exactly, does that mean? How do we do this? What can we do to live more in the moment?

There’s no easy answer, but I think it really begins with a shift in mind-set. We need to find a meaningful way to integrate the new technological advancements into the fabric of our lives.

We’re not going backward. Tech is here and advancing. We can’t detach modern friendships and relationships from technology. Sure, occasionally you still meet a few technophobic Facebook refuseniks, who refuse to participate in social media, text messaging, or online photo sharing. Of course, we need to be respectful of everyone’s preferences and varying comfort with tech, but there’s no doubt that it becomes harder and takes more effort to keep in touch with those people. We’ll likely only do so if they are very important to us.

New technology has revolutionized our ability to connect and reconnect with our friends and frenemies, our loved ones and ex-loved ones, no matter their location or ours.

Once upon a time, the messages we wrote in our friends’ high school yearbooks were likely the last words we would ever have with them. This made yearbook signing a very momentous and solemn occasion. I would take up full pages in the tiniest writing I could scrawl for my best friends’ yearbooks, and confessions were left in the margins. But today, we can stay in contact with our elementary or even preschool friends, if we can find them.

The most beautiful moments of our lives can be captured and shared as they happen. Events can be organized on the fly, and new friends can easily be introduced to old ones. And baby photos—we can never have too many baby photos. (Well, okay. I’m biased.)

Of course, as with any technological change, some things can go terribly wrong. It’s easy to spend hours online ignoring your loved ones or feeling lonely. Birthdays are now stressful and complicated: Is it okay to just post on Facebook? Do I need to send a text message? A card? A phone call? Is it okay to not acknowledge a birthday if we’re really only acquaintances? What if I forget someone’s birthday entirely? And on my own birthday,
how on earth am I supposed to respond to all those messages and well-wishes
? Oh boy.

So, what’s the answer? It’s all about reminding ourselves to live our online lives in moderation and enjoy tech-free moments with those close to us. If attention, scarce as ever, is a sort of currency today, then we might as well spend it cultivating meaningful experiences in our lives and with our friends online as we would offline.

This is not to say that we should spend long hours deeply contemplating every interaction. Sometimes tech just gives us brief, fun, and transient moments, like when we scroll through an Instagram feed, retweet a funny tweet, or forward weird YouTube clips to friends for no other reason than to make them laugh or enjoy a moment of downtime for ourselves.

We need to keep an eye on our daily balance of attention. Cat videos shouldn’t edge out the attention we pay to our actual cats. If we’re at a concert, we shouldn’t spend more time seeing it through the tiny screen on our phones than with our own eyes.

If you’re at the Grand Canyon, and before you lies all the great and encompassing majesty of the natural world, stop uploading #canyongrams every few minutes. Spend time appreciating the beauty of the moment, and only upload the image that evokes the feeling you want to bottle and return to for years to come. Just because you
can
document your every waking moment doesn’t mean you
should
.

This is the same reason that “going out alone” is a thing now. No, it doesn’t mean dining solo. It refers to a “retro” trend in which young people meet up with their friends but leave their phones at home, as a way of getting closer to their friends by giving them their complete and undivided attention.

I recently benefited from this trend by accident, when a colleague said to me, during a recent lunch, “My phone just died, so you’re going to have to deal with my complete, undivided attention for the next hour.” That “hour” lasted until we found a power outlet. But for that brief moment, it was pretty great.

Some people are taking the de-smartphoning trend even further and taking a “digital Sabbath” on Saturday or Sunday. If we want to make tuned-in time with our families important, this may be a nice thing to try. Although, good luck prying that smartphone away from a teenager. Perhaps make a point to “go out alone” as a family for dinner one night, and leave everyone’s phone at home before getting into the car.

Most of the complexities, demands, and awkwardness of modern friendship online can be traced back to the problems of a poor tech–life balance. When people build up expectations of their friends’ actions offline or online—and those expectations aren’t met—that’s when disagreements, resentments, and hurt feelings start.

If it’s been a while since you’ve seen a friend you usually text, maybe it’s time for some actual face time. If Instagram is the modern equivalent of sending a postcard—well, you wouldn’t spend your entire vacation at the beach writing postcards, would you?

For people you’re really close to, a birthday wall post that reads “Happy birthday!!!” isn’t going to cut it, even if you use three exclamation points. Pick up the phone and make a call. Let them know you care.

Sure, remembering somebody’s birthday once
meant something,
because you had to make a conscious effort to do so. In a world without Facebook, it would be
creepy
if Josh, who sat next to you in eleventh grade advanced-placement English class, wrote you a letter on your birthday to just say happy birthday.

“Dear Randi,” it might begin. “I know we haven’t spoken since 1997. I hope this letter finds you well. As it happens, I have remembered that today is your birthday, and so I’m writing to wish you a very happy thirty-first! Party, party, party time!! Enclosed, please find a photo of my dog and three pictures of sunsets. Do you like them? If so, write me and let me know that you do, at the address listed above. Very truly yours, Josh.”

At that point you would need to change your name and move to a new address, which is not convenient at all.

Things are different now. It’s perfectly normal, acceptable, and even nice for the Joshes of your past to wish you a happy birthday. Today, personal information such as your birth date is readily accessible public information and the sort of thing you would probably share as part of your authentic online self.

This is why a proper tech–life balance, which sets clear expectations regarding the new online boundaries of behavior, is crucial to avoiding hurt feelings. Social networking has made it so incredibly easy for anyone we’ve ever met to wish us a happy birthday that the greeting is inadvertently a less valuable indicator of closeness than it once was.

When a big life event occurs—a marriage, a move, a new job, or a new significant other—it may be a good idea to give close friends a pre-Facebook view of these major life changes. It will make them feel closer to you, and avoid potential offense, than being lumped into the mass of people on your friends list would.

Brent proposed to me on a beautiful Valentine’s Day evening in 2007 at the Ritz Carlton in Half Moon Bay, California. After the initial enthusiasm, tears, surprise, and shock had set in, I decided it was time to make some phone calls. We quickly made a mental list of everyone in our lives who would be supremely offended if they found out about our engagement via only a Facebook post and not directly from us. Luckily, Brent had been super sneaky and had already given a heads-up to my family (apparently my mom was at home just waiting for the confirmation call), our close friends (many of whom had helped him pick out the ring and plan the proposal), and my team at work (so he could whisk me away midweek for an overnight trip to Half Moon Bay), so the list of people we had to call was pretty short.

The next step was to post the “ring shot” on Facebook. If you’ve ever spent ten minutes on Facebook, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about.

But then I put the phone away for the rest of the night and didn’t check it again until late the following day. I wanted us to really enjoy our time together and start off this new chapter in our lives by giving each other our undivided attention.

In the early days of Facebook, when everybody in the company was not only a coworker but also an online “friend” of everybody else, a few of us went on a fun-filled trip to Napa. Upon returning, I was confronted by a colleague who had seen the posts about our trip and demanded to know, through stifled tears, why she hadn’t been asked to come along. I didn’t have a good answer. Nobody had excluded her; it was just that this excursion was thrown together at the last minute. I didn’t mean to hurt her feelings. I wasn’t even in charge of the guest list. But she felt sensitive about being left out, and seeing all the photos of her friends having fun without her made her feel jealous and unhappy. Sometimes the very best aspects of being connected are also the aspects that are hardest to stomach.

This new phenomenon, which has accompanied the rise of social media, has an acronym: FOMO, which stands for “fear of missing out.” FOMO refers to the feelings of jealousy and inadequacy experienced upon seeing the impossibly awesome lives of your friends, and studies have shown that this is a real thing. According to a study by Dr. Andy Przybylski, published in the July 2013 issue of the journal
Computers in Human Behavior,
people who recorded the highest levels of FOMO had the lowest levels of satisfaction in life. The conclusion was that FOMO could actually “distract you from making the most of your time in the here and now.”