Facebook: Why did your friend on the job market (or in some other time crunch) disappear?

Why did your friend on the job market (or in some other time crunch) disappear?

Or, why I will not be hanging out with you the next few months

As much fun as hanging out and chilling can be, when people are in a major time crunch like I am right now, they find it very difficult to hang out with friends who want to chill. You might wonder, “But can’t you take out just a few hours from the day?” Yes. Yes, we can. But be honest, do your hangouts last only a few hours or typically last a lot longer? This post is meant for those folks whose hangouts last a lot longer. We can take time out only when we are doing structured activities that have a definitive start and stop time. We cannot hang out if it will go on till whenever and maybe folks will stay up all night. We cannot go on events if, when it’s over, everyone decides we want to hang out some more. We cannot party like we can take the next day to relax and recover from it. We need to be firing on too many cylinders at all times. This gets harder for people like me who don’t have their own mode of transportation and thus can’t control when they can come and go to these hangouts. We are in a rushed state of mind, and if we come to hang out with you when we are feeling rushed, all we will do is ruin the chill mood. And when we expect to be in a prolonged time crunch, we find that hanging out with you ends up being a time sink in which we lose a lot of precious time. Even though hanging out will be tons of fun. That’s why we prefer to hang out with only other people who are also in similar time crunch. Because we need to be around people who have the same mindset of time as a precious resource. This is in no way to throw shade at you for having the free time to chill. We wish we could go back to that too. But we can’t right now. Because we (well, at least I) signed up for this time crunch.

How can you support your friend who is in such a time crunch?

You can check in on them from time to time. You can plan a structured activity with them that respects their time. With a definitive start and stop time. But please bear in mind you have no obligation to do this. Someone else’s mental health should never come before your own. But please understand that your friend did not disappear because they stopped caring about you. Your friend just cannot afford to join in the fun right now. They need a different kind of support right now that you are perhaps not able to provide. And that is FINE. Hopefully they can find the support they need right now (and boy do they need it!) from another source. But you should at least try to understand, otherwise, this is how resentments start to build. As long as you understand and respect their time crunch, things will be fine. Your friend will see you again when they get to the other side.

[Permission to share granted. Copy/paste the text and cite me.]

[P.S. I wrote in the second person because it felt too awkward to write it all about myself and I am fairly confident that a lot of people will relate to my sentiments; but I know a lot of people might not. So apologies to those people whose view point I misrepresented.]