The Electric Fence Stopped Working Years Ago

This is right. People ask my how on earth I know what every one of my high school classmates is up to, when we were the last class of the millennium. Along with a number of old teachers and other randoms from years ago.

I just stopped having a filter. When I think of someone, I just fire off a message. The message doesn't have any warnings on it like "oh I know it's been a while" or "you might not remember me". I write to everyone as if we are best buddies who just had lunch last week. People I've known since the age of 4, to people I've known for four days.

If I see someone I know at a wedding, I just go and talk to them about whatever we have in common. Normally someone we know.

I really think it's the guarded, tentative, "you don't have to talk to me" that turns people off. Of course people are free to not talk to me, but I don't lead with that. If you lead with that, people feel awkward, like "is he just being polite?". If you just pretend you are best buddies, people play along and they end up quite comfortable quite quickly.

I never had this fake sense of shame or embarrassment when it came to contacting people. Some people will keep tabs on when someone last contacted them, and hold it against them. I don't.

Just last month I had lunch with middle school friends I hadn't seen in 40 years. I literally hadn't seen once since Grade 8. I friended them on Facebook years previous but didn't really have anything to chat about, but when I was in the same town as them, I pinged them and said let's go to lunch. It was absolutely amazing, once of those moments that I will remember forever. Not because anything breathtaking happened, but it was just really really nice to connect with people I hadn't seen since the beginning of my life, and meeting them all over again as adults.

I still routinely have lunch with coworkers from 25 years ago. I have friends that I chat with on Whatsapp daily going back almost 50 years. I have no qualms in being the first to reach out, ever.

I have a friend from college that I have been in and out of contact for 30 years, who ghosted me for no reason this past year even after I contacted her a few times. Guess what? I won't hold it against her and I will give her space. I will ping her for her birthday and see if she responds and if not, then I will just leave her alone until she contacts me. But I don't feel shame or anger or embarrassment because I got rejected, that's on her, not me.

For most of us, certainly including me, a lot of those electric fences are alive and well.

They are powered by thoughts associated with pain. Anything that triggers those thoughts, triggers that pain. We are not even aware of how our thinking has been constrained. We just avoid the possibility of triggering the thought.

A person constrained by such a fence is very obvious from the outside. We see the irrational rationalizations that they can't. Because our thinking isn't constrained by the pain that shapes their thinking. But it takes work to accept the pain of your own painful ideas.

> The fence isn't there. It never was. It's just the memory of some childhood rejection, some social rule someone made up, some fear that caring more makes you matter less.

Chesterton's Fence would say that maybe there is a reason and you should tread carefully. Sometimes a relationship died because it should have. Maybe you feel uncomfortable messaging someone because they have given nonverbals that they don't like your company.

For horses, the electric fence is a psychological barrier. You understand the shock doesn't do real tissue damage, but they don't. [1] If they value freedom and learn that you can crash through the fence and feel just a moment of pain they will crash through the fence.

[1] I did find out though, that the fence really hurt a lot more when I was standing in a puddle with cracked rubber boots. I imagine it hurts more if you're heavy, well grounded, and standing on four big hooves with metal shoes.

The reaching out to an old friend example is a powerful one. In my case I missed out on a decade of two of my most valued friendships (it was both halves of a couple) because of a fight that didn't really have to be a big deal.

And one night a couple years ago I admitted to myself how much I missed the friendships and decided to send a text. They were really glad to reconnect. I drove 7 hours to see them. The reunion was one of the best moments of my life.

> Think about it, when was the last time you were annoyed that someone reached out to check in? When did you ever think less of someone for being the one to text you? Never.

Apparently the author doesn’t know a certain kind of obnoxious people. ;)

I can unfortunately think of some fairly recent counterexamples to "why not reach out." They didn't justify keeping imaginary fences up, rather they justified cutting those people out of my life entirely, because they just don't fit into the overly tidy script of "might as well try."

Just as it is important to not deny yourself positive social experiences with people you trust, it is just as important not to hold out too much hope for change and be generous when it is not merited, as the consequences can lead straight back to maladaptive coping patterns.

Loved the write up but it all canceled out when I realized it’s a blog for an app that’s “your social operating system”

I don't initiate conversation most of the time, not because of some kind of perception of weakness but because I don't really have time to hold conversations with every random person that I know. I like knowing they're there but I don't really feel the need to socialize with them or make smalltalk on a regular basis. If there's something I want to talk about I'll reach out but only if I know the conversation won't go on for days.

I don't play the stupid games "Oh so and so hasn't reached out in forever I hate them now" or "weakness vs strength" in communication. Communication is a tool.

I don't dislike having friends. I just wish everyone stopped these stupid games and stopped acting like everything needed to be a calculated action. We're animals who evolved to make a bunch of stupid over-thought games for ourselves that make us miserable. If you don't want to talk to someone or don't have time, don't talk to them. If you want to talk to them, reach out.

I don't understand why I'd need some app to solve that. I don't feel hindered approaching life this way. I either get more of the time doing the things I care about or I get to potentially have a good conversation with someone. Don't let some company or app's profit create more barriers in your head.

For a happy minute I thought we were talking about the malloc() debugger. Such a useful little tool back in the day. Allocation was a disaster back then.

https://github.com/kallisti5/ElectricFence

Great writeup, lots of wisdom in there. Then I looked for other insightful articles and lo and behold

> Real connection beyond social media.

> Your social operating system. Get perfectly timed reminders to connect with the most important people in your life—never lose touch again.

Obviously it's another app, just another attention rent-seeker that wants to inject itself into human connections so they can make more and more and more money.

This is called "learned helplessness"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Learned_helplessness

Author here: Walking past a house recently, I watched a dog refuse to leave his porch as the owner explained that the electric fence has been broken for years. It hit me, we're all trapped by fences that stopped working long ago. The mental model that being the first one to reach out to friends keeps us isolated. There are systematic flaws in our modern social protocols that cause smart people to miss social cues, or be afraid of initiating them. After analyzing hundreds of these invisible barriers, I've found that the people who break them aren't socially gifted, they've just realized how to move past the social conditioning that keeps us stuck on the porch. The electric fence has been broken for years.

Invisible fence.

An electric fence that stopped working years ago is still a fence.

Some electric fences are still working but don't hurt much. Among them, laws that are weakly enforced.

Just because there is a fence doesn't mean we can't test it a little.

This resonates with me and frankly it makes me feel worse about some very specific missed opportunities when I was held back by myself. But can you teach an old dog new tricks?

Funny enough, an alleged Chesterton's fence is very likely to be one of these derelict electric fences. People who advocate the "Chesterton's fence" argument (which is similar to and equally misguided as the precautionary principle) are essentially saying "whoever built this fence either didn't understand why they built the fence, or didn't manage to explain their reasoning to other people affected by the fence, and therefore it's our responsibility to either respect the fence forever or invest an unbounded amount of resources trying to discover the reason the fence was built."