Not Caring If People Get Back To You Is The Best Modern Survival Kit

For this past holiday season, a popular gift giving theme on daytime TV was survival kits. Maybe it was the recent hurricane or snowstorm in the country that has had us all thinking that we should be prepared for whatever comes our way. Flashlights and special meal kits complete with heating capabilities were shown being stored in a compact and convenient way.

But in my humble opinion, the best survival kit of modern times hasn’t been something you can fit into a camping backpack. Yes, my family lives in the woods and we have a generator that we need to use multiple times a year, sometimes for a week at a time. It’s hard to think of something better than that. However, maybe there is.

I feel the best survival kit we have nowadays is not caring whether or not people email, text, or call you back. There was devastation in people’s faces as they opened their emails to find out that their adult children had not gotten back to them yet about holiday plans. At the gym, their friends told them that their children were probably too busy to get back to them within two hours. It’s not a reason to keep your cell phone on at night.

There was desolation in people’s hearts as they did not hear back from a job and they needed that extra income as soon as possible. Their spirits were not lifted as their brother-in-law explained the probability of hearing back. No numbers helped. Their email inbox was empty and it should be full of the balloon display of good news.

You cannot care if you’re on an online dating app and your crush doesn’t get back to you. This is a greenhorn mistake. You cannot put all of your eggs into one basket. The world is full of people who have feelings. I know this does not help. Look, the world is now full of flaky people. Does that help?

I remember it starting when practically everybody had a cell phone in the world for the first time and people started running late and calling people to let them know. It’s all gone downhill from there. Never getting back to people at all, ghosting, is something that even steady people still struggle with. Sometimes, the only thing they can do to try to feel comfort is to do it to somebody else. This does not help.

If you do not care that your former boss did not email you back with a letter of recommendation, you are going to do well. Ask somebody else. Or just don’t apply to grad school. If you can move on after your best friend of 10 years flakes on you and still watch that favorite movie that you always watched together, you are going to do well.

If you find yourself struggling with people not getting back to you, you are likely not busy enough. At least, that’s what the flaky people might tell you, because they say that they are too busy to get back to you. Get a hobby, go to the gym, start a side hustle. Or, if you want to be even more empowered, don’t make your life as supposedly as busy as these flakes. You don’t need to distract yourself from their absence, because you have learned to not care.