I’ve been testing a new app, Mesh, to be more thoughtful with my relationships.
It does so by consolidating all the interactions from emails, calendars, phone calls, apps, and social media, then rates the strength of each relationship. Not the content of the messages, just the frequency of contact.
Then, I can set recurring reminders, get notified when someone changes their Twitter or LinkedIn headline or have it choose a few people each day for me to connect with.
A few days of cleaning up contacts, my behavior changed. I started adding emails to calendar events (for tracking). I started texting people I wanted to move from medium relationship to strong relationship.
As Camille pointed out, this is a fool’s errand. Frequency of contact is not a complete indicator of the strength of a relationship. It misses the chemistry, depth, care, and shared experiences.
But who doesn’t want to be thoughtful in their relationship?
Being one of 200 people to congratulate someone on a new job on LinkedIn is not the same as sharing the joy with them at dinner. Worse, it can backfire if it is received as performative. It reminds us of the eager salesman wanting to hit their sales target while losing touch with our humanity.
Alas, a consolidated and updated database of contact information can be useful. If I am visiting a new city, I look up friends who have moved over. If I’m thinking of a new garage workshop, I can find the friend who used to be a builder in his past job and ask for advice. Now, with the additional help of Claude, I can save their previous professional experience and look for people with weird hobbies for my new project.
Modern tools, especially those that quantify and notify, has an invisible force. If we are not careful, it can lead us down a wrong path. As these tool gets cheaper and fancier, I constantly comes back to, what’s it for? Is this worth the money, time, and energy to learn and maintain?
And as David puts in, what’s the point of AI if you end up working more?
