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Well. Start now. Treat it like an algorithm. Schedule reminders to text/email/call/follow up with people. My ADHD was hard. I would just forget about people and not because I don’t care about them. Then I would feel bad and delay even further because of that. Just do the thing. It may never feel natural except with very close and trusted people. That’s okay. Having friends for the sake of it isn’t the point. Being genuinely interested and sharing experiences and common interests and learning from each other are good reasons though.

You still can. Most people have more and less social periods of their lives. I have plenty of _very_ social friends in their 40s/50s who weren't as social in their 20s. Or the opposite. Life is long, and many of us need decades focused inwards with others focused outwards

My advice is to go somewhere in person and to keep going there consistently. It could be a club, a meetup, volunteering, etc.

The internet is the fast food of socialising. While it might be quick and easy, the quality is terrible. You’ll make real life long friends just being in the same room as someone regularly and chatting face to face.

Sounds good, let's be friends! Feel free to email me anytime, and I look forward to us staying in touch.

You said it yourself, you never developed the skills. there's a learning curve, but learnable skills they are. You need the courage to start developing a skill that you're completely incompetent in, and just do one thing each day. I was in the same place as you at 32 but four years later It's another story.

Volunteering to help the vulnerable (in person) helped me with the vacuous superiority. I met some amazing people who just had bad luck. Your post shows you're on the right track and might be ready to make the next step.

Many will tell otherwise, but I think it is fine to not have these friends, contacts and acquaintances etc. In my case I did put in effort to stay in touch, call up people after many years. But in most cases result was like "Okay, we were in same school/office/rpoject/neighborhood / waited for same bus etc...etc.. now what do you want from me?"

It maybe that you most definitely want it. However for me "missing out" hasn't make life any worse.

Perhaps the name "ZpJuUuNaQ5" makes it harder for people to be able to do casual chit chat and introduce you to their friends?

Funny I go out a lot and I have so many random numbers in my phone from dudes who added me, single serving friends for the night

But yeah I only have like 5 real friends and then maybe 10 acquaintances eg. work

Taking a look at your past comments, I agree with you about you curating "vacuous superiority."

That kind of self insight is valuable.

So maybe, ya know, stop pretending on the internet that you have things figured out?

For what it's worth, it's never too late to keep in touch. You said you wish you'd kept in touch, if you're able, you should reach out. No one cares that its been awhile (and they're equally culpable), most people are happy and/or flattered you were thinking of them.

> I have only now started to realize that all that vacuous superiority has led me nowhere

It's not too late, but it might need more effort than if earlier.

You're only 29 -- I have good friends in my life that I didn't meet until I was in my 40s.

You might need some hobbies which are more social, like volunteering. It's very easy to fall into work -> hacking at stuff -> sleep cycle, but you can't live inside your own head for the rest of your days.

I'm older and I've lived through the analog era, before people had cell phones or internet. Facebook wasn't around when I graduated from college, so most contacts from before that withered away -- especially if you ended up living in a different state or city.

It is sometimes heart wrenching to hear about people from your past, knowing that you didn't keep in touch. A girl that I went to elementary school with, always kind of an odd girl (but in a good way), developed leukemia in her 30s and passed away in 2019. I didn't know for seven years. Seven! I went through her Facebook page and it was a roller-coaster of emotions, playing her life backward as she chronicled her condition worsening, periods of hope, all the way back to when she was saying that she had some kind of bug and felt awful.

She was a good friend to me in elementary school, but we ended up going to different high schools and different directions after that. I feel bad that we didn't keep in touch, and that I was completely unaware of her suffering.

I can't wallow in this, though, and this is where I'm attempting (maybe poorly) to make a connection to your situation. You can't change the past, but you can start making meaningful attempts to forge new relationships and to rekindle old ones. Those people that you never kept in touch with? Reach out to them, if only to say "Hi". Reach out because you want to do it, and not because you need something.

How many days will you sit there and think "why doesn't anyone reach out to me?" when you, yourself, are not also making the effort to do so?

> There is only a faint aftertaste of missing out, which sticks to me like tar. I can’t wash it off.

Sure you can. There are various paths to it, some outlined in sibling comments, and here’s another one: Pick up the phone and call or text some of those people you wish you had kept in contact with. Don’t have their contacts anymore? Ask someone who might or find them on social media. What do you say to them? “Hey, I was recently thinking of <that time you did something together> and felt like reaching out. How have you been doing?”.

Maybe beforehand “collect” some relevant events which have happened to your life since you last met, so you have something at the ready to keep the conversation going if you need. I’m not saying rehearse it, just have them in mind. If you need some small talk tips, see this short video.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IRG-YubP1rw

You have to find people you value, then it'll feel worth it

29 isn't remotely close to too late, dude.

That is the saddest thing I have read on this website.

I know it seems stupid, but hit the gym. People will want to be around you if you have muscles.

I used to have saving turned on for my MSN Messenger chats back around 2001-2004. I didn't lose them. 10-15 years later or so I had a look through them and the cringe was so powerful that I deleted them all anyway.

I logged with AIM which was a pain, at least for the late 90s version I was using, bc you had to save each chat manually. Then a Kramer-like friend wandered over when I wasn't home, got on my computer, came across the saved chats, and deleted them all. I did this kind of self-logging for the same sort of navel-gazing reasons as the OP but it really turned off friends, who thought it was about keeping a file on them.

I have my msn logs along with a lot of old stuff in an ecrypted hard drive with a password I have forgotten. I am waiting for divine enlightment to remember the password, or quantum computers to finally come.

Weirdly glad to hear I am not the only one effectively having lost them.

I'm not sure if it needs to be said, but one thing that is possible only if you keep your old chats is the analysis TFA made.

Why do you feel the need to delete your chats? Is it to save space? Would you still do it if you had unlimited storage?

My friends and I have 14+ year group chat, and we sometimes get drunk, scroll back, and make fun of ourselves. Worth every penny.

The author didn't keep the chats, the companies he interacts with did.

>Armed with GDPR and data access laws, I got myself archives with all my messages, reactions, and social graphs.

Did you keep your high school yearbooks?

I wish I had kept my IRC logs but I am quite happy the ICQ logs are gone.

Hi, OP here. No idea how I did it ten years ago, but looking at the Dunbar layer contraction, my active network (e.g acquaintances) peaks at 275 in 2016 and gradually declines to about 60 by 2026, and the close friends layer drops from 9 in 2016 to 5 in 2026.

Honestly, it sounds exhausting. Different strokes for different folks, I guess...

Tbh I wish all messaging apps worked like this. While it’s kind of cool to make charts like this, the privacy implications are pretty terrible for keeping conversations forever.

A data breach on an IM app would be one of the most devastating leaks ever. And there’s just not that many legitimate use cases for keeping all history. If someone tells you something important you can make the effort to move it to their contact or notes in your phone.

there's a tool for extracting chat history from signal desktop, you could build a plaintext and attachment archive with that if it runs regularly on your pc and appends new chats from the last run.

Do you keep separate notes for things like recommendations or addresses? I often dig through my chats to find them.

Hi, OP here!

TF-IDF was the first thing I tried - it works great for stopwords but it doesn't handle cross-language bleed of filler words well, and the short life-event messages ("he died", etc) use common words and get aggressively down-weighted.

I had some asymmetry analysis when looking at directional sentiment and per-person question rates - that's fun indeed!

I also went with the Jaccard convergence and the endearment categories instead of wordclouds, so that I could see how word choices are changing across time.

Huh, the export function in Telegram Desktop (https://github.com/telegramdesktop/tdesktop/) is still there. Click on the three dots while in a chat and then Export.

Was any explanation given as to why the export functionality was removed?

Would not recommend to send your chats to some provider on openrouter. IMO one should only use local models for this sort of data

Or how about your opinions on yourself? Analysis of your own behavior, done by AI, seems like a a decade of therapy provided by a maybe-good-or-bad psychologist happening in minutes. The impact of that could change how you think about the world by reinforcing biases you hold or weakening strengths by making you self conscious.

Ultimately you run the risk of having a computer program redefine who you are as a human and that begs the question of whether you’re really you after that?

If you configured e2e encryption beforehand and know the key, you might get lucky with the backup files on your old phone

Do you still have those phones/Android files?