Article

Attention

Change

Character

Digital

8 January 2025

5 min read

“I’m just not good at staying in touch”

Rather than make excuses, be honest.

Iona Curtius

Iona is a PhD candidate at the University of Aberdeen, studying how we can understand truth.

A woman holds her phone up in her hands and looks at it in a slightly vexed way.

David Suarez on Unsplash

This is an article about honesty… but we’ll get to that.

I cannot count the number of times I have heard some variation of the phrase “I’m sorry, I’m just not very good at staying in touch” or “I’m just terrible at texting, sorry”. Usually, such apologies are accompanied by a shrug of the shoulders, a helpless smile, sometimes even a hint of smugness. Every time I experience such an interaction, I get a little closer to losing my patience. So, it’s probably safer for everyone if I voice my thoughts in this way, safely tucked away behind a screen.

What’s going on here? I believe it’s quite simple: dishonesty. Now, I don’t wish to unjustly accuse anyone of lying, much less assume ill intent. I’m sure everyone who has ever said that to me has believed it to be true. But, as we will see, that’s part of the problem.

Nobody is naturally ‘good at staying in touch’. Nobody is naturally ‘good’ at texting. These aren’t ‘natural’ forms of communication, or even ‘natural’ relationships. We have the opportunities now to meet and form connections with SO many more people than our forebears did. It is impossible to build, let alone maintain close friendships with everyone we meet. Relationships take work and effort, even with people we see regularly. So, what’s the problem with saying “I’m not very good at texting”? Isn’t it a normal, reasonable thing to say?

The problem is that it is used as an excuse. Just because something is hard or does not come naturally does not mean we can’t do it. We do hard things all the time, if we feel they are important and worth our effort. Doing the dishes doesn’t come naturally to me and I hate doing it. Still, I don’t invite friends over for dinner and then tell them, “Sorry, I’ve made food, but you’ll have to eat it out of the pot because I’m just not very good at doing the dishes”. I value my friends (and my health) so I do the flipping dishes. I’m not as on top of it as other people but I have found ways of helping myself to do a task I ‘naturally’ struggle with.

But back to the matter in hand: I believe that the aforementioned excuses are dishonest because finding texting hard is not actually the reason we don’t stay in touch with some people. What these phrases are hiding is “making the effort to stay in touch with you is not worth my time”. Now, obviously, most of us would never dream of saying anything quite so mean. But if we are honest with ourselves and look at our lives more closely, I do think that’s what it boils down to. Simply putting a nicer sounding lie in front of that does not make it any better.

So how do we get out of this? The answer is simple but not easy: honesty. Be honest. With yourself, above all else. Ask yourself, truly, “Why am I bad at staying in touch?” Are you trying to stay in touch with too many people at once? Is it a time management problem? Is it an attention problem? Do you simply forget someone exists if you don’t see them? It’s ok if that is the case. Just be honest about it. Once you have correctly identified what is making it hard you can decide whether you want to find ways to make those hurdles smaller, or whether you are simply going to be more honest in future. You don’t have to directly tell someone “You aren’t worth my time” (in fact, I’d strongly recommend not doing that). You can say something like “I find that maintaining (close) friendships at distance is particularly hard for me, so I focus on friends who are geographically close to me”. Or something similar. Be honest about the reason you find staying in touch hard.

If you are frustrated with how ‘bad you are at texting’, here are some ideas for how to make it easier on yourself. You might think about adding one or two of these to your routine at the beginning of this new year, perhaps.

If the problem is busyness or object permanence, set reminders and/or have ‘reply-amnesties’ where you reply to the texts from the week/fortnight/month. Some apps allow you to pin chats that are important to the top of your page, so you always see them when you open the app. Or, alternatively, you can archive those you don’t need so there’s less clutter. If the problem is the medium, texting feels impersonal, you don’t like having to be constantly ‘online’, or you live in a cave on a desert island, you can find other ways. Could you arrange (regular) calls? If you’ve recently won the lottery, you could send a letter by snail mail. Whether it’s voice notes, video updates, group calls, online board games, or Netflix watch parties, the possibilities are near endless.

One more thing: set expectations. Rather than simply telling people what you can’t do, tell them what they can expect. “Yes, I would like to stay ‘in touch’, but I prioritise the people who are geographically close to me.” “I won’t frequently reply to texts, but I do a reply amnesty every couple of weeks, so you’ll hear from me then.” If you do want to ‘be better at staying in touch’, let people know how they can help you. Maybe you struggle to initiate conversations but you’re happy to reply. Maybe you’re in a position to be able to say, “You can come visit me any time” or even “I’ll be in touch when I’m in the area and we can get together over a hot beverage or a meal.”

Just BE HONEST. Please.

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Column

Character

Culture

Economics

23 May 2024

4 min read

This revolting rich list is a freak show

What are we to make of this quite nauseating spectacle?

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A collage of famous, rich, people such as King Charles, Elton John and others.

The Sunday Times.

General elections are no longer a clear choice between socialism and capitalism, but we should still be as offended by the privilege of the few over the poverty of many. That’s only natural, whether we’re informed by envy, a secular sense of fairness or a religious faith.

The yawning chasm between rich and poor in the UK is offensive. When PM Rishi Sunak was drenched in his vale of tears this week outside Number 10, as he announced the general election, he was seeking a mandate to preside over this inequality, in which he so richly participates.

He stood there exactly three days after he and his wife waved from the pages of the Sunday Times Rich List, based on the newspaper’s “conservative estimates of the minimum wealth of Britain’s 350 richest people.”

The Sunaks stood at 245th on the list with a measly £651m. Just 20 years ago, when I was in business, that figure would have put them near the top. Some of my business contemporaries had even made the Rich List with just a few tens of millions.

Not anymore. Mere multimillionaires barely make the cut. The ever-widening gulf between the super-rich and the rest of us means that the top 165 of last Sunday’s list of 300 are now billionaires, compared with just 20 a quarter of a century ago, while the “bottom” of today’s heap struggle by as half-billionaires.

It does make you wonder what the Sunday Times is doing with this revolting annual survey. It has become such an anachronism since it started in the Eighties, when greed was good and we worshipped Croesus impersonators.

Every year, we’re invited to press our noses up against their plate-glass window and drool at a world that’s as alien as a pharaoh’s to the slaves building their pyramid. What do they want from us for this display of greed? Envy?

Times (even on Sunday) have changed and the Rich List satirises itself. Look at the ads that support it. There’s one for a 122-metre yacht that can be chartered for three million euros a week. A few pages later there’s one for a Swiss clinic “for the treatment of mental health and issues of substance and behavioural dependency”. Could these ads be related?

So what the Sunday Times is presenting is a kind of freak show. Roll up, roll up, see the people who are tax exiles from the planet.

The Rich List is just for the British mega-rich. So no room here for Meta-billionaire Mark Zuckerberg or space-wingnut Elon Musk. But it’s nice to see at the top of the list, with just a couple of hundred million over the £37bn-mark, the Hinduja family, whose leading lights so publicly acquired British passports some years ago, with or without government help.

And here’s Lakshmi Mittal (No. 8 with £15bn), who was recently accused of profiting from both sides of the Ukraine conflict, after a part-owned Indian company bought nearly £2.4bn of Russian oil since the start of the war. Which newspaper revealed this? Step forward the Sunday Times.

And there’s vacuum magnate Sir James Dyson (No. 5 with £21bn) who backed Brexit and then moved his global HQ to Singapore. That’s the beauty of being so rich; you can escape the consequences of your own actions.

Most of the list is what similarly might be called colourful. These cannot, by virtue of their economic separation, be normal people. So what the Sunday Times is presenting is a kind of freak show. Roll up, roll up, see the people who are tax exiles from the planet.

Money is its own reward. But ultimately its power is empty.

What are we to make of this quite nauseating spectacle? Sure. there is no virtue in poverty. But nor should there be a prosperity gospel, which holds that the righteous are financially rewarded, other than in the outer reaches of an American charismatic movement.

Among the things that make us go “hmm” in this report is the attitude to life. Phones 4u founder John Caudwell (No. 109, £1.5bn) says “If I stopped I’d probably be desperately unhappy.” Hmm. New entrant to the list Graham King (No. 221=, £750m) made his fortune from public money contracts for accommodation for asylum seekers that inspectors have described as “decrepit” and is currently the subject of charges under the Housing Act 2004. Hmm.

Cursed are the rich, for they shall lose touch with reality. That’s not a heretical rewrite of the Sermon on the Mount, with its “Blessed are...” Beatitudes. There are actually four lesser known woes in the Gospel of Luke:

“Woe to you who are rich, for you have received your consolation. Woe to you who are full now, for you will be hungry. Woe to you who are laughing now, for you will mourn and weep. Woe to you when all speak well of you, for that is what their ancestors did to the false prophets.”

These woes aren’t about revenge. But they do speak to the consequences of extreme wealth – such as profiteering from desperately vulnerable people or working so hard you can’t think properly.

Money is its own reward. But ultimately its power is empty. Today, the Sunday Times should be as ashamed of idolising it as those it lionises for making so much of it.