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Being Ghosted

Over the last five years, I have being ghosted at an exponential rate. Both professionally and in personal life. Email has gone the way of phone calls it seems - most people will not respond unless they were expecting to hear from you (via email). Job applications end up in the reject pile about 99.9% of the time these days. Attempts to network and broaden the base of professional connections end up failing at about the same rate. 

People I was once friends with don't respond to text messages for months and may randomly show up out of the blue asking if I want to hang out. I took them up on those offers a few times in the interest of jump-starting a near dead friendship but it proved to be a waste of time. You cannot maintain a meaningful connection with people if you see them at very random intervals of time - there is no story of you and this person that has grown together. Very fortunately for I have long exited the dating market so at least don't have to deal the special kind of misery that being ghosted by someone you thought you had some spark with. 

I don't know if ghosting is a contagious thing the world is picking up from Gen Z. It seems like if a person is ghosted often and long enough they will end up ghosting others - this is about having their expectations reset to the point where the only socially acceptable form of response is no response at all. To otherwise might signal being needy or overzealous - not useful or positive things to signal. Those of us who lived a different life before this became the cultural norm have to adjust to the reality of the times we live in. 

“The high rate of reciprocal ghosting may be due to a cyclical emotional pattern,” says Licensed Clinical Psychologist Dr. Alexander Alvarado. “Once people experience the discomfort of being ghosted, they might unconsciously adopt the same behavior as a self-defense mechanism, thinking that it’s better to disengage first than risk emotional harm.”

After V scheduled lunch with me for the 14th time, I decided it was time to stop. This is someone I have known for a decade and half but there is still a line. It seems if someone has personal emergencies at that cadence they probably need to sort more important things out than where to grab lunch with a friend from a long time ago. 


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