I spent today lounging on a red couch at a cafe in Palo Alto, curled up in a ball, reading and sipping tea. This past week, I have gone ice skating, talked about Las Vegas on a porch in the sun, eaten sushi and climbed a roof to watch the stars. Unlike jumping off a plane, all these activities do not seem particularly extraordinary. At the same time, these moments have crystallized into something worthy of remembering, if only because they were initiated by somebody else.

There is a lot to be said about proactivity and reciprocity. I believe that most of the world exists not as singular, free-floating atoms. Rather, we clump together in giant molecular chunks of matter. While this metaphor is arguably terrible, what I mean to say is that few people can exist independently of other humans, and much of what holds us and society together is affirmation. Seeking people out, wanting to spend time with them, and affirming the need for their presence also, in a way, affirms their existence and their importance.

This way of thinking about human relations has framed the way I approach people, which is to say, with great amounts of passion. After all, people do many things to relax. They listen to music, they watch movies, they look at videos of kittens on Youtube…and while I do devote some time to music, movies and kitty videos, a large part of my time and energy is devoted to people. Finding out about people–their personal histories, opinions and ideas–is what really makes life meaningful for me. I can drop whatever I am doing to listen to somebody’s problems. I will give up opportunities to make money or gain fame to further understand and better love people. And aside from the fame part, where I have yet to be made an offer to be Hollywood’s new Lucy Liu, these are all things that I have done and will continue to do, however much giving up tangible rewards may seem like an extremely stupid decision to those around me.

My overwhelming priority placed on people, however, sparked off a crisis, the background of which lay in my belief that completely equal reciprocation in any relationship should not matter. For example, Sam directs all her energies toward hypothetical person Miriam. Miriam, at first, thinks Sam is a strange creature. Until the point where Miriam thinks Sam is as cool as Sam thinks Miriam is cool, Sam loves Miriam more than Miriam loves Sam. In this sense, friendship is unequal and love is unequal.

But does this matter? Sam can derive affirmation of her importance from other sources, and because love, I believe, is not a zero sum game, affection for Miriam should not reduce Sam’s capacity to have affection for others. Talking about myself in hypothetical third person aside, I also believe that ensuring constant equality in a relationship, and consequently attempting to calculate human emotion, is both petty and impossible. As a result, I often spent my time keeping tabs on a group of something like fifty different people, organizing outings, meet-ups, and special events. Putting indiscriminate effort into everybody seemed like the way to go.

Yet, my crisis came along when I began to think about who among these fifty people valued my time, effort and care. Even if love is not a zero sum game, time is. If, after a certain amount of time, putting great effort into something yields nothing for either party, all the time spent and energy spent is akin to a blank space. It might even be counterproductive, where I create negative utility for my recipient of the care. If my goal is to make others happy –which it generally is–caring for certain people ironically defeated my purposes. Moreover, my over-exuberant proactivity left no space for their reciprocity: I was wiping out an indicator or descriptor of the nature of my human relationships.

What I ended up doing, predictably enough, was to come up with a project, where I decided to take a hands-off approach to people for a short period of time. I stopped organizing outings and bugging people, and even slowed down my rate of compulsive texting. What I discovered is that some people did contact me, to talk, to ask how I was, and to meet up to climb roofs and drink tea. At the same time, not every person from my giant group of friends had the capacity to keep in contact, and among those who could not keep in contact, a few probably weren’t bothered.

In a way, my project was helping me construct a VIP list of my friends. Certainly, the information I gleaned opened up a whole new can of worms: if I compulsively want to continue giving to people who do not give back, that illuminates another host of problems I need to resolve. But the first step to understanding the nature of what we do is to first describe our habits and then question them. In seriously constructing my VIP list, I believe that I am on my way to articulating where I am on the list of priorities for various people. Such information will not simply help me plan my time better, but could potentially create greater amounts of utility and happiness for everybody involved.

While I still value the importance of reaching out, there are dangers to spreading oneself too thin. The most meaningful human connections, I believe, occur when people are not substitutable. When they leave your life for certain periods of time, you notice and miss their presence–and the same should be felt the other way around. Who these people are in your life, I think, is an important question, and when you have that figured out, give them a call. Ask them to go ice skating, then talk with them about Las Vegas on a porch in the sun. Or perhaps, one evening after a giant plate of sushi, climb a roof to watch the stars.

Do it. Or just email Sam at [email protected] .