I’ve done this on numerous occasions and not once has it lasted/been worth it overall. I’m not saying it can’t be nice but in my experience connecting with the people you’re surrounded by naturally is more rewarding than digging through your past.
I got back together with an old tabletop group recently.
Five or six years ago we wrapped up the campaign we were running to take a little break. Scheduling became tricky, a couple of people were expecting their first child and some others were starting new jobs. Without a common meeting, the group just kind of faded out.
Anyway, a couple months back I bump into one of the players and we start talking. Shortly after that, he starts up a new group chat trying to get the band back together.
My mental health has been an absolute shitshow the last several years, so I really agonized over whether I wanted to try to get back together or embrace the solitude that I desperately crave for my free time. Well, I went against my initial judgment and it’s been awesome playing with likeminded people again.
A couple of friends still can’t really make it, the schedule is too difficult with young kids. But we brought in a couple new players too and the funny thing is that even with new people it still feels like old times.
Had a best friend for 15 years or more, lived together for a few years after uni, went separate ways and contact died off
I saw him come online on steam and sent a message asking how he was etc. he said he was fine. Monosyllabic after that.
I look him up on dormant socials and he got married, didn’t mention it, no invite. Rest of the friend circle all there.
Cool cool cool.
Never hear from them either, so… it may pay off for some people, or just be an embarrassing reminder of how easy it is for some people to discard you. Neurospiciness also a factor on my side too.
I’m the inverse. I abandoned all my friends because I had to move forward in my life and make my life better.
I look them up every so often. half of them are divorced, struggling, or dead. the other half are alcoholics and slowly walking towards deaths doorstep.
I got out because someone I cared about showed me I was worth more than I believed I was. They gave me a goal to achieve and I will be forever grateful.
my point is, sometimes people drift apart because it’s time. look back on your time together with the same fondness you had in the moment and never forget you learned much from them, and still learn from them even if only indirectly.
even the worst examples can teach us something.
I smell survivorship bias.
I have a 20% hit rate on this (literally 1 out of 5). It was okay; we caught up, chatted for a couple of weeks and then realized there wasn’t much left to go on.
If I could do it all over again, I wouldn’t.
During covid lockdown I made a list of every friend I still had a phone number for. I called someone for a chat once every few days. I called about fifty people and most conversations went for 2-3 hours. We had a great catch up. Zero of those people have initiated a return phone call.
OTOH I caught up with friends from an old gaming club and the new club has a bunch of people I used to know. They’re not going to reach out, but there’s an event fortnightly that I"m welcome to.
I had some other friends that I distanced myself from as they were all getting into meth. I don’t mind a loose party but meth is a step too far in my books.
We met for lunch, where I found out she was a teacher at a private school and heavily anti-vax. Haven’t spoken to her since.
Still, I’d try it again with someone else. Catching up can be fun.
I reconnected with a friend. For a short period of time we lived in the same city, met up and became friends, then they moved away and contact died off. After some 3 years of minimal contact, I reached out. Timing must have been “right”, they told me they were having a hard time. I wasn’t doing great myself. We randomly decided to share memes. We religiously shared at least one meme a day, every day for almost a year. It wasn’t much, but it got us to find out more about each other’s sense of humor and helped both of us out. Now, we are doing better, we voice chat every month or so and are relatively close. I’m one of the few people knowing of their personal problems, they were between the first to know about my personal news. We still live very far away from each others, but that seems less important.
I reconnected with my lifelong friend last weekend and it was great. It’s been about 4 or 5 years. Turns out we’d both gone through a lot of the same shit in that time and were able to share the trauma.
It’s been my goal to make an effort to reconnect with people through the months of September and November. We’ll see how it goes.
I tried to reconnect with an old good friend of mine but he has kind of gone off the deep end, deep into drugs and conspiracy theories. We used to see eye-to-eye on things. Used to be compassionate, informed. Kind of a burnout now.
He asked me recently what I thought about “the shot” knowing my partner and I both worked in hospitals during that time. He got immediately cold when I was blunt about my pro-vaccine stance after he prodded. After he got cold, I reciprocated and that’s that. Oh well. Hope he finds stability. I can’t put out everyone’s fire.
My sister is another story that I started to write about, but I think I’ll save that for another time. That one naturally hurts the most.
This requires having friends previously? I don’t meet that metric.
