The Friend You Have Not Called in Three Years

There is a person you were genuinely close to. Not a contact — a friend. Someone who knew you before the current version of the role was built, who had access to the actual person rather than the presented one, who could say things to you that the current ecosystem does not produce.

You have not spoken to them in years. Not because anything happened — no falling out, no specific severance. The friendship simply became one of the things in the category of what would happen when things settled down. And things have not settled down. And the years have accumulated.

What makes this particular postponement different from the general category of deferred priorities is its specific cost. Not to the friendship, though that cost is real. To you. To the version of you that that friendship held — the one that existed before the role became primary, the one that is increasingly unavailable in the current ecosystem of managed relationships and professional obligations.

The people who knew you before the current success are among the most valuable relationships available to you precisely because they do not need anything from your current position. They know the actual person. They can offer the specific quality of honest, non-transactional engagement that the current ecosystem structurally cannot provide — because in the current ecosystem, almost everyone has something at stake in how they relate to you.

Seneca, in his letters to Lucilius, describes the gradual impoverishment of the inner life that occurs when a person stops making time for genuine friendship in favour of managing their professional network. The network produces utility. It does not produce what friendship produces — the specific experience of being known rather than assessed, of mattering to someone for reasons that have nothing to do with your current position or capacity to deliver. Without that experience, Seneca observes, the inner life becomes progressively thinner regardless of how much the outer life accumulates. The person who has many contacts and no friends is, in a specific and important sense, alone in a way that the contacts cannot address.

The call that has been deferred for three years does not require an explanation. It requires only that it be made. The person on the other end has also been carrying the unreturned call. The relief of its arrival — for both parties — is almost always larger than the awkwardness of the gap.

What has been lost in three years of not calling can be partly recovered in one conversation. What continues to be lost in the next three years of continued deferral cannot.

Make the call. Not when the schedule allows. This week. The schedule will not allow it. Make it anyway.