Day 324: Living Quietly

After spending all day Monday working on my post about moving to Taiwan (seriously, that took an ungodly amount of time — I’d forgotten how much harder it is to write something meant to be read vs. the stream-of-consciousness rambling I normally do here), I posted it on Facebook so that more people could find out about it because it’s a sweet opportunity that very few people seem to know about.

It’s been a while since I’ve shared stuff on Facebook, and I was surprised by how many people reached out after seeing it. There were people who are already here or have plans to come to Taiwan and wanted to meet up (including a high school friend who I haven’t seen in over ten years!), people who were interested in learning more (including a friend of a friend who’s been trying to come here for years and was super stoked to find out about the Gold Card), and people who just wanted to catch up.

Since I’m going full hermit mode in quarantine (TBD whether this is a terrible idea), I told the last group of people that I’d be happy to video chat in two weeks once I’m out of quarantine. In general, I’m not a huge fan of video chats and other forms of digital communication (I mean, part of the reason I came to Taiwan was so that I can hang out with people in meatspace again), and I’m still not sure how I feel about that. My strong preference for in-person interactions means that I’m not very good at staying in touch with a lot of friends and that my romantic relationships suffer greatly when long distance. On one hand, maybe this means that I should work on it and try to embrace texting, video chatting, and all the way we send bits around the world to connect with others. But on the other hand, maybe it’s not a problem. If I know that I prefer in-person interactions rather than staring at faces on a screen, why not embrace that and design my life to foster those kinds of interactions? The tension between social norms and what feels right to me here feels similar to the one in my practice of keeping all my notifications turned off to protect my attention from constant interruptions. Sure, it means I respond slowly to people and some of them will be turned off by that, but that’s a tradeoff I’m willing to make because the peace of mind is worth it.

The preferences I described above is indicative of how much my approach to relationships have changed over the years. In college, I was all about quantity — I cared much more about how many friends I was making rather than how meaningful those friendships were. That meant that most of my friendships ended up being shallow because my time and effort was dispersed across so many people. Now, I’m much more interested in fostering deep connections with a tight-knit group of people. I’d rather have 3 very close friends who feel like life companions than 3000 acquaintances who I sort of know.

Is this what happens when you get older? Is this why people talk about the difficulty of making friends in adulthood because people have mostly found their close friends and it’s not constantly changing like through high school and college?

I wonder how much of this has to do with seeking approval from others. That’s got to be a part of why I wanted to make as many friends as possible — so that I could feel liked and accepted. I remember finding out that one of my college girlfriend’s friends didn’t like me, and it bothered me to no end. I simply couldn’t come to terms with the fact that somebody out there didn’t think I was the best thing since sliced bread.

Now, I feel much less sensitive to things like that, and perhaps that’s part of the reason why I’m happy doing my own thing even if it means forgoing opportunities to connect with people (or “grow my network”, although that kind of language implies a commercialized / transactional view of relationships that I’m not a fan of). There’s a kind of joy in living a quiet life.

i’ve gone full hermit, haven’t i