I Tried to Meet Up With WeChat Contacts I Hadn't Talked to in Ages. I Got 4 | Beating Boredom During Spring Festival
Expanding your social circle still takes work...
Expanding your social circle still takes work...
The holiday has begun.
It's a chance to catch your breath, and also a stretch of time spent wearing yourself out keeping up. However you spend it, you probably don't want this rare holiday to pass exactly like every other one.
So here's our Spring Festival edition of Hack Your Life: two things a day. Turn left for a new life skill, turn right for a few novel games. We've also run some wildly imaginative life experiments, to give your curiosity something fresh to chew on.
Happy New Year!
How many contacts are in your WeChat?
How many of them do you talk to every day, and how many have you barely spoken to since the day you added them?
As a journalist, talking to people is one of the most important parts of my job, but off the clock my social skills aren't much. Leave aside the WeChat contacts work brings me, and the friends I keep up with can be counted on one hand. I don't do a lot of liking and commenting on Moments either.
Plenty of people must be in the same position. Through social networks you can turn up an elementary school classmate from ten years ago without effort, or reach a like-minded stranger you've never met. It looks as though your social space has expanded without limit, but the people you can actually talk to at any depth are always the same few sitting at the top of the list.
Maybe you spend all day with your phone in your hands, scrolling through other people's updates, and then feel stiff and uneasy talking to family and friends in person. You know someone like this (or you are one) — lively and outgoing online, remote and cold in real life.
What has changed is the way people connect. The relationships WeChat carries give you the illusion that they're "not that important"; they're easier to throw away. Once you open an online conversation with someone, acquaintance or stranger, you can delete them or stop replying and walk off at any moment. Face to face is far more complicated than that.
That's what this life experiment set out to look at: in the two weeks before New Year, try to meet up with people I might not have contacted in six months, or a year.
Plenty of companies have a lot to get through at year's end — the annual party, projects taken on at the last minute — so people may still be busy at work. Add trips home, or friends who made plans long ago, and not being able to find the time is entirely likely.
My bigger worry, though, was what pretext to use — as the subject of the meetup, or as an opening line — that would make the other person trust me.
Normally, just asking someone out for a meal or a coffee works fine. For someone I hadn't sent a WeChat message to, or seen in person, for three or four months, or even half a year, it might not.
One thing to note: the friends I tried to see in this experiment were limited to my non-work social circle. Peers in the industry, interview subjects, corporate PR and marketing people and the like were all out.
While getting ready, I first set myself a few questions to answer, so I could prepare. Some of them:
- How do you open with a friend you haven't seen in a long time?
- How do you get someone you've only talked to online now and then — a designer or developer at a game company, say — out for coffee in person?
- How do you get high school roommates back together when you've only met up once since, and what do you talk about?
These were my starting questions for two weeks of calling up WeChat contacts I hadn't talked to in ages. My preparation was to try out methods I came up with myself while also Googling similar questions and other people's accounts.
Google turned up a fairly well-known case from 2014. Matt Kuleza, who worked at an Australian music label, planned to spend three years taking all 1,088 of his Facebook friends out for coffee, one a day. He set up a 1000 Plus Coffee account on Tumblr and wrote up each coffee — how it went, how he knew the person. He's currently stuck at number 79.
As for what I expected from the experiment, the goal I set myself was that it should be an effort to widen and firm up my circle of friends.
I don't have much free time outside work to begin with. I live in the Shanghai suburbs and the trip is long, so workdays and even weekends are hard. And even when I do have time, it's easy to fall into contacting the same fixed few, which shrinks the circle fast.
In the two weeks before New Year I tried to contact nearly 20 people, and ended up seeing 4. Here are some of the methods I tried and what I found.
Saying Hello Is the Most Important First Step
How do you keep your opening from looking like boredom — like you had time on your hands and happened to scroll past someone's chat window? That was the main question I turned over while preparing. Put another way: what frame of mind best moves things toward an actual meeting?
The questions above did come up, as it turned out. Plenty of people have shared what they've learned about this. On Zhihu, for instance:
......
Answers like these concentrate on how to pick a topic once the meeting is arranged. The step before that — opening your mouth, settling on a time — usually goes unmentioned.
The online community wikiHow and a CNN column do lay out a fairly complete method. What these pieces mostly discuss is the expectation you need to set before contacting a long-lost friend: you are, in effect, trying to earn their trust back, and that takes the right kind of approach and a bit of time.
Of everything I dug up, that part — the expectation you set yourself — was something I'd thought about but never sat with. What helped most was understanding the state of mind of the person on the other end, and doing what I could to keep them from assuming I'd only written out of boredom. Boiled down, and adapted to the Chinese context:
- A relatively formal channel; in China, a phone call, a text message or WeChat all work well enough
- Give the other person time to take it in and trust you again; you should say more, and put more of yourself into it
- You can bring in mutual friends and make it a dinner
- You can talk about the friends you had in common, and what's new now
- Line up something to do afterwards — a ball game, a get-together
The method I came up with was to find occasions before New Year that made a meeting natural: proposing dinner in one of the long-running WeChat groups I eat with, and using a Spring Festival gift as the opening line.
The gift idea came to me while I was going through my contacts. This year I'd bought a number of things that could serve as presents: giclée prints to hang on a wall, New Year red envelopes, red wine, crafts made out of gourds, WeChat fridge magnets ("You there? Heh," plus WeChat stickers)...
I'd never done anything like that in past years, so this year I had something slightly out of the ordinary to use as a reason to see friends.
Sorting Through My WeChat Contacts Was Harder Than I Expected
The biggest side effect of the experiment was that I clicked through all 1,350 of my WeChat contacts, one by one, and re-tagged them. Mainly because WeChat gives you no direct way to tell how long it's been since you last talked to someone.
That's when I remembered WeChat once had a feature for filtering out friends you rarely contact. But after checking the app on my phone and searching Google, I found it had only been tested last year: it screened for infrequent friends using set conditions — number of chats, shared groups, replies on Moments. Whatever it was worth, later versions of WeChat dropped it.
After more or less cleaning out my WeChat contacts again and steering clear of PR, marketing and industry peers, the pool I could work from came to this: middle school, high school and college classmates; colleagues from a college internship; designers; DJs; Airbnb hosts; plus a few tech company engineers I'd met at events, and people I'd hiked with.
What Do You Talk About Once You Meet?
Before opening with a coffee invitation, I first checked whether the person would still be in Shanghai before New Year. Whether or not they wanted to come out, this was one of the most important questions, and one of the easier ones to settle.
I tried contacting most of the WeChat friends in that pool at least once. Some were already on their way home, some had already left Shanghai, and more had plans with friends or work to finish before the holiday. The reason I heard most often was: wait until this pre-holiday crunch is over, or just push it to after New Year.
But some wrote back and agreed to get coffee.
To make the conversations easier to plan, I thought up topics in advance. With a DJ friend I'd known for a while, for example, the plan was to talk about Shanghai's bars and clubs, as a way of getting to know the city.
Mostly, though, it came down to reminiscing and catching up on what's new, with shared hobbies and people we both like to diss helping things along — the latter especially, perhaps.
One edition of the QDaily Research Lab dictionary had an entry for this:
[Diss-based friendship] A way of making friends guided in theory by the political-thriller maxim "the enemy of my enemy is my friend" and the street wisdom "friendship begins with badmouthing someone together." Making friends over shared interests is too vague — two people who both like movies still have to be sorted into those who like Wolf Warrior and those who don't — whereas dissing some person, thing or event together is the perfect bottle-opener for conversation. On that basis, we hope Weibo will soon roll out "you have both blocked Li Ji in the past three months," with NetEase Cloud Music following up with equally thoughtful, practical friend-recommendation features like "you have both been skipping Chen Li's songs in your personal recommendations lately."
The Result: 4 People in a Single Day
Even with some preparation done in advance and some sense of how it might go, the way things actually played out took me by surprise.
On February 13, in one day, I saw 4 people: 2 high school classmates, 1 college classmate, and a former colleague who now works in food e-commerce.
There should have been 2 more — a tech company engineer and a DJ, both meant to meet me at a café that day. The engineer was spending the holiday in Shanghai with his parents, but lunch clashed with my high school classmate, so we moved it to after New Year. The DJ friend had time in the last week before the holiday, but we never pinned down a slot.
The high school classmate works at a small creative agency. In February they'd just picked up a video ad that would air right after the holiday, so it had to be finished before it; he only had noon to 1pm free, and we ate at a restaurant next to his office.
The conversation drifted onto that video ad, and from there to Joy Story: Joy and the Heron, the spot JD.com commissioned from an overseas animation studio, and to Tmall's cat food and dog food ads — which, it turned out, he'd never seen. After lunch I went up and freeloaded on their office air conditioning and WiFi for a while. They're in a standalone building near a subway station, and the company has all of 11 people.
The other high school classmate studied accounting; the last time I'd been in touch with him was a year ago. He told me he'd changed jobs six months earlier, moving from the Bund to a fund company in Lujiazui, and that before the holiday he was still on duty until midnight, waiting for a set of data to come in so they could build a report.
The college classmate I only had time to see briefly, for a couple of sentences, is still in graduate school and was spending Spring Festival finishing his thesis and graduation project. He used to sing with the Rainbow Chamber Singers; back in 2016 I even got performance tickets from him, though I never ran into him after the show. This was the first time we'd met since college, and he egged me on to put together a dinner for the guys from our year.
Then there was the former colleague, whose work sits closer to food and coffee. We met at a small café on Wuyuan Road, where the barista turned out to know QDaily. I'd planned to talk about food; my former colleague also filled me in on how things were going at his company and recommended a Stanford University course and video on the subject.
A Few Thoughts on Widening Your Circle
Letting geography and work decide how often you see friends probably counts as laziness, and it only makes your circle smaller.
More and more, because I live in the Shanghai suburbs and the trip is too far, I choose to see friends for dinner on weekdays. On weekends I stick to a few familiar dinner groups I talk to often, meeting up to eat and play board games.
For a journalist, meeting more people and learning about more industries and phenomena is part of the job. But looking back at 2017, you could roughly estimate how much my network had grown just from the number of chat windows — and it was nowhere near enough.
Something else I hadn't noticed: if you keep in touch with friends day to day and know their work habits and schedules, you have far more times and places to choose from when you want to meet.
And having more skills of your own helps a good deal with widening the circle and holding on to some of the people in it — climbing, dancing, ball sports.
Cover image from: Pexels
Translated from the original QDaily article. Original publication date retained.