Years ago I read the book, "How to Practice" by the Dalai Lama. Like any book, there were a few parts that stuck with me. Paraphrasing, one of them was:

"If you are in the right frame of mind, your worst enemy cannot hurt you. If you are in the wrong frame of mind, your best friend visiting can seem like a horrific chore."

100% for me. Holidays, with non-immediate family coming over, are a nightmare. I would be happy to meet at a restaurant or bar. Prepping the house and a menu of meals, snacks, drinks, etc. is not somthing I ever enjoy. It's stress from beginning to end. I've been known to feign illness to avoid these visits.

Can you tell me the connection to what I said?

Best friends don't send me these little text messages.

These are the extremes. At the extreme with the "wrong" (bad word, for mine) frame of mind even your best friend is horrible to talk to. You are very unusually at that extreme. Half way between the wrong frame of mind and the opposite point on that spectrum you probably want to talk to your best friend but not someone further down your ordered list of friends. How far down is the cutoff where you don't want to talk to that person at all? That tells you how far away you from the (not so much worst, but probably most introverted) frame of mind you are.

Remember your very, very best friend in the world wasn't that at some point and you had this whole journey of incidental and deliberate contact over time for them to get to be there.

Someone thinking of you and braving the reach-out rejection vibe to send you a message asking how you are, well they might not be being totally manipulative and selfish and horrible. At least mentally give them that chance, and yourself that you are worth it.

2c, ymmv, everything said may not apply to you in any way at all.

It's an opportunity for engagement. Sometimes nobody wants to take the opportunity but it's valuable to have.

If you want it to be more engaging, make it so. Ask questions in return, share good responses. "How are you?" can be answered in one word or several paragraphs.

Please don't let those experiences discourage you from continuing to reach out though.

I actually kept a table with people to stay in touch with them every: - month - quarter - 6 months - a year (if its less then you remember anyways)

I quickly killed that approach, because people who genuinely understand overwhelm also are always happy to catch-up once in a while and we hold no hard feelings if we don't speak for another year.

Serendipity and randomness wins.

For instance, I know people who were part of the greatest generation that would have decades long pen-pal type relationships with people they hadn't seen in person in years. It was pretty common for them to send several long hand written letters to several of these friends every year, for 30, 40, 50 years. But I don't think I've encountered anyone in younger generations who would do that.

15-20 years ago, I had a number of e-mail acquaintances who I'd send long e-mail to every few months, and they'd send another long e-mail in return. This went on for years, but with the increase in popularity of social media, these exchanges dwindled into nothingness.

Likewise, I remember when almost everyone I knew was on AIM. But that became old fashioned, for some reason. Not for any particular reason; people still can and do communicate with text messages, and it was no extra effort to keep an AIM client running in the background. But when something new comes along, there's usually an exodus from the old.

Up until recently it seemed that Facebook was the platform to communicate, and it had a very specific, shallow form of communication sent to everyone. Though now even that seems to be dying down.

Mst people are driven by social trends at large. If you sent a handwritten letter to an acquaintance at one point in time, you'd get one in return. Likewise with a friendly e-mail talking about your life. Nothing we have now is really a replacement for e-mail, but it's more trendy, so the old form of communication gets completely neglected.

But here is a good tip, people who want to stay in touch, will be in touch.

People who want to stay in touch and are busy will respond, are happy that you reached out and will suggest a catch-up

Rest is well, not worth your effort.

You can easily feel the vibe and if you would be a person I knew or met at some point I would be: "Wow so great to hear from you!"

I had this case last year when I reached out to an acquaintance, whom I helped back in the days and suggested a "catch-up over a zoom". To which he said he can't allocate time right now as he is busy. Had the same happened on Twitter. It felt a bit painful at first but then people are just living a busy life these days. Its a weird world that nobody experienced before...

So don't worry about these feelings, just do it anyways and worst case scenario you have a great catch-up and happy memories.

This flies in the face of the whole point of OP's post. It's hard to stay in touch. Even when you want to. I have at least 2-3 friends who were very good friends at one point and who I'd like to be good friends with again but we just don't keep in regular contact. When we do talk its great but for some reason or another we don't talk often.

In this case they did not even link to the study! They literally only have a link to the magazine's description.

Several searches haven't yielded the study they are referencing either, only more content farms running the same story.

I would hope to see better evidence if this is genuinely established. That doesn't mean it's wrong, but "established finding" is a high bar.

Did you actually read your posted source? It does not mention Tylenol, nor is it on Sci Hub. I can tell you what is in it, I can not read it for you however.

It is likely Google Scholar selected it because it cites another study which does discuss Tylenol, however that study does not support the claim being made and instead makes a different specific claim.

> all about how physical pain and mental pain is basically physiologically identical

That is not what your linked study says. I would encourage you to read it slowly. The study you linked is making a very specific, very narrow claim regarding the neural circuitry of social pain observed in some conditions.

I did a paper on this subject some years ago, so I know the info is legit. I didn't expend a ton of effort because information on human beings in hacker news is almost always shockingly lacking and so if I bother to write a high quality post it almost always gets either ignored or downvoted - because the "experts" here don't have the knowledge base to recognize what is true.

And as for scholar, if you type in the right terms, 99% of the time it gives good results. So in this case obviously "tylenol" is not a good search term because that's a brand name. What you want is the active ingredient, which in this case is Acetaminophen. If you type "Acetaminophen rejection" into scholar what are the results?

I just did and there's a wealth of highly cited studies backing up OP's claim, including the very first result.

Randomness you said?

ORDER BY RAND() LIMIT 1

I'm sorry, but programming languages need to call that function either RND() or RANDOM(). Ever since I read The Wheel of Time in the nineties and early aughts, I can't associate that word with anything else.

It's likely that most traditionally successful people have some sort of task system in their life. Who's to say that the most socially "successful" people don't have similar systems as well? It reminds me of the show Veep, where the main character's entourage whispers in her ear the name and info about a person she's about to shake hands with. The whole persona of a politician is based on making and juggling and keeping connections open. Biden is still in regular contact with people from decades ago from the beginning of his career, for example.

I told a friend once that I was using the Habitica game to help me stay productive. He was incredulous, "You really need a piece of software to tell you what to do?!" He manages and co-owns several ice cream stores, so I know the stochastic method is feasible in more complex lifestyles. That's just not the case for my brain.

I admit that I am hesitant to build a social system because of the expectation of perception of cynicism or even sociopathy. I have my friend's birthdays on my calendar. Why shouldn't I also have a little blurb about what they like, what they're up to and a log of our contact? I think I would be floored and honored if I found out a friend lovingly kept little journal entries about me, I mean, after the intial weirded-outness I guess.

I call it "The Poor Man's CRM"

Also, really a lot of effort to maintain, as each platform tends to frequently push breaking changes :(

I can imagine -- a solid feed with reply capabilities sounds like a maintenance nightmare. But a smaller feature set could cover the queuing need described here -- something that just extracts a simple .csv file listing contacts and when they were last contacted.

Is it only for text? Will the fact that I video-chatted someone appear in Beeper, even if I have to use a different app to video-chat? It doesn't include email, right?

but... maybe that's what you have to do when you get older, busier and more forgetful and maybe it's not icky at all, as you still maintain who goes on the lists.

Most people don't know I organize my relationships. Of those that do, maybe 20% think it's icky.

"Would you rather we fell out of touch?"

I started to write too long comment about how I feel scheduling my life would not work for me, but that doesn't add anything to the discussion.

I've just texted an old friend.

And I think I'll set up some yearly reminder to reach my few friends that don't respond anymore, but that I care about anyway.

At the end of the day, just catching up with people that I used to see and talk to on a daily/weekly cadence has been a significant emotional boon, and I don't see any downsides. Some of the reaching out didn't go anywhere, and that's fine - most were very worth my time.

I think phone numbers and social profiles are probably the most future proof, as I see a pattern of people moving away from personal email for anything other than spam and shopping related receipts

Sometimes conversations don't go anywhere, just the "How are you?" "Fine" kind of stuff. Never had a negative experience. Have had a fair amount of positive ones - news about friends having kids, finding partners, new jobs, etc. A few people who had left my life are now back in my orbit.

At the cost of a few minutes, it's potentially high gain.