It’s been estimated that the average American will spend about 8 months of his/her life opening junk mail. Would anyone consciously choose to do that? Probably not. But how many will end up doing it anyway?

And this is just the average. Some poor folks actually spend years of their lives processing junk mail. This is especially common if you have multiple sources of mail, such as your home and a business.

Each piece of unwanted mail you process is a needless waste of your life. It’s also a major source of distraction that gets you thinking about things that are off course for you.

Even if you don’t open most junk mail, it still wastes time to pick it up, look at it, identify it as spam, and trash it. And if you’re ever tempted or tricked into opening some of it, it wastes even more time. Even if you’re way better than the average, and you waste only 10 minutes per week dealing with junk mail, it will add up to nearly 87 hours wasted over the next decade. That’s like working more than 2 weeks full-time just to process junk mail. And this doesn’t even count non-junk mail that you may also process.

Fortunately there are many simple steps you can take to reduce this unwanted nuisance down to almost nothing.

Raise Your Awareness

The first step is to assess how much mail you’re actually receiving. If you process your mail every day or two, it may not seem like a lot. But if you collect it over a longer period of time, such as 30 days, you may realize just how much of a waste it is.

When I started traveling more and had my mail held by the Post Office, I noticed just how much would accumulate during my absence. Also, as I would recycle all my mail, I could physically see just how much would pile up during the two weeks between recycling pick-ups.

I recommend stockpiling all your unwanted mail for the next 30 days. Then you’ll see just how much there is.

Alternatively you could compile a list of what comes through, but I prefer to let the physical pieces pile up for an easy visual assessment. The recycle bin is an easy place to do that.

Another reason to keep each physical item is so that you can use the information on them to cancel them from being sent in the future. More on that later…

Question Each Piece of Mail

Now for each piece of mail that arrives in your mailbox, ask yourself whether it needed to be sent at all.

I find that in most cases the answer is an obvious no.

I realized that there were only two types of mail I actually want to receive: pieces containing checks, such as royalties or affiliate commissions, and packages containing goods that I specifically ordered. Everything else is superfluous, at least in terms of sending physical objects through the postal service.

There are also some notices which I’m okay receiving by mail, such as bills and tax forms, even though I don’t necessarily need to receive them by postal mail.

If you didn’t need to receive it, and if you’re likely to receive something similar again, consider it a candidate for elimination.

Manually Opt Out

The next step is to manually opt out with each company that sent you something you didn’t need to receive.

Most junk mail will include a phone number or URL. I think the easiest approach is to call them. Phone them up directly, and get a live person on the line. In my experience this isn’t difficult. Then say, “Hi, I’d like to stop receiving all mailings from your company. Would you please add me to your opt out list? I’d really appreciate it.”

They’ll ask for your mailing address, do some database stuff, and that should do it. Usually these calls take about two minutes.

Sometimes it’s helpful to have the mailed item in front of you because if they have any difficulty finding you in their system, you may be able to give them an ID number or customer number from the address label. This makes it fast and easy for them to look you up.

When you do call, be as polite and friendly as you can. Most likely the person handling your situation is just some student trying to earn tuition money by working in a call center. I always get their name and use it when I talk to them. Don’t act like a jerk or treat them like dirt, or you may give them reason not to opt you out properly.

Often you can also opt-out online. Go to the company’s website, and look for a link to their privacy policy or a contact form. Sometimes the privacy policy will have a section with instructions on how to opt out of their mailings, usually a link to a form or an email address to use. Otherwise just use the contact form. I recommend the phone option, however, since it’s typically faster, and then you get confirmation that you’ve been successfully opted out of their mailings. If you email them, you may not receive confirmation that you’re opted out.

Note that you can even opt out of those coupon and local advertisement mailers. Just look for a phone number or URL on the front or back. Worst case you can probably find a number for their advertising sales. Call them up and ask to opt out.

Once you do opt out, give it a month or so to take effect. Don’t be freaked out if you still get something a couple weeks later. Often these companies have mailings queued up for weeks in advance. You have to allow time for their physical mailings to sync with the database update.

Be sure to call companies you’ve done business with, such as your bank, to ask them to opt out of mailed solicitations. For me one of the worst offenders has been Cox Cable (a major ISP in Las Vegas). They sent junk mail constantly to promote their Internet phone service, cable TV, etc.

Sometimes if you just get one nasty mail spammer to stop, it can save you a few hours over the course of a year. Realize that even 5 minutes per month processing junk mail is still an hour per year, and 10 hours over the next decade. Take two minutes today to save those 10 hours later.

My #1 nemesis when it comes to junk mail has been DirecTV. Sometimes I’d receive two junk mailings from them per week. I’m glad to be opted out now, but their incessant spamming has convinced me to never do business with them. They gave me the mental association that DirecTV = spammer. Their service is obsolete anyway, so perhaps that’s the reason for their desperation.

Ask for Maximum Privacy

Additionally, ask these companies to set your account to the maximum privacy settings possible. Tell them you don’t want your info shared with anyone. It’s common for companies to share customer data for marketing purposes, so this step can cut down on a lot of junk.

Be sure to call:

• your bank
• mortgage lender
• credit card companies
• insurance providers (auto, home, life, health, etc)
• phone companies
• investment account holders
• cable company
• Internet provider
• any other mail-happy company with which you have an account

Watch your mail to see who’s mailing you.

One annoyance I had with Cox Cable is that they told me I could only opt out of their mailings for one year at a time. I thought that was incredibly lame, so I pushed back, but the guy told me their system is actually programmed to force him to enter an expiration date with a maximum of one year out. So I gave up and just added an entry to my calendar to call them again in one year to refresh my opt out.

Switch to E-Statements

Many vendors such as banks, credit card companies, and utilities now allow you to receive statements by email or via their websites, so mailing physical statements isn’t necessary. It’s cheaper for them, so sometimes they’ll incentivize you to switch to e-statements, or they’ll punish you with a “statement fee” if you don’t.

You can still print out hard copies if you need them.

Do whatever you think is best, but you can always try e-statements for a while and then switch back to paper if you don’t like it.

Opt Out of Direct Marketing

The Direct Marketing Association has a website that makes it easy for you to opt out of common catalog and junk mailings in one place. Their members use this service to screen their lists, and they have a lot of members.

Just visit DMAChoice.org and follow the instructions. You have to create a free account to use this service, but the process is quick and easy.

Opt Out of Credit Card Offers

If you have a credit file with the major credit bureaus (which happens by default if you open any line of credit such as a bank loan, student loan, or credit card), you should know that they share your info with other companies that may result in your receiving credit card and insurance offers by mail. I’ve probably received hundreds of these offers.

If you’d prefer not to receive such spam, it’s very easy to opt out. Just call 1-888-5-OPT-OUT (1-888-567-8688), or go to www.optoutprescreen.com and follow the instructions.

You can opt out for 5 years or permanently. If you want to opt out for 5 years, you can do that by phone or online. If you want to opt out permanently, go to the website above; you just have to print and sign a short form and mail it.

I did the permanent opt out.

If you ever want a new credit card or some insurance, it’s easy to find vendors and apply online. There’s no need to deal with distracting junk mail for the rest of your life due to spam that originates from having a credit file.

Add Yourself to the Do Not Call Registry

Americans can also reduce or eliminate unsolicited telemarketing calls by visiting www.donotcall.gov. It should take about one minute to add your numbers to the registry. Just remember to do this again if you ever change phone numbers.

I used to get spam calls several times a week by telemarketer scum, but after adding my numbers to this list, it’s down to virtually nothing now.

For good measure you may want to add your fax number too if you have one. I don’t see how it could hurt.

For more info on this, see the Do Not Call Registry FAQ.

Kudos to the Federal Trade Commission for providing this service.

Don’t Use a Forwarding Address

When you move it’s tempting to leave a forwarding address with the Post Office, so they’ll automatically forward mail from your old address to your new one.

This is convenient, but if you want to reduce your junk mail, I think it’s best to avoid using this service. It makes it too easy for the spammers to stay in touch.

Let the important mailers know your new address. Let everything else die.

Be Vigilant When You Move

When you move to a new place, you’re likely to get some junk mail from vendors who target move-ins, especially if you just bought a house. Bed, Bath, and Beyond comes to mind. Furniture stores are another typical source.

These mailings are often addressed to “Resident.”

Let the junk pile up for a few weeks after you move in. Then take 30-60 minutes to call everyone to opt out. Otherwise you may become a permanent addition to several new mailing lists, and this will waste hours, if not days, of your life down the road.

Close or Recycle Unneeded Mailboxes

I’ve often maintained a PO box for my business, usually for receiving mail orders. But the longer I’ve held such mailboxes, the more spam they accumulate, especially if I list the address on my website. After a few years of having such a box, the mail they receive can become 95% spam.

Last month my current PO box, which I’ve had for a few years, was due for its annual renewal. I was about to cut the check when I paused and asked myself, “Wait a minute… do I really need this box anymore? What would happen if I dumped it?” It was probably getting about 65% pure spam, but nearly 100% of the mail received there was unnecessary.

Originally I opened the box to receive mail orders and for people who wanted to send feedback by mail. But for all the workshops I’ve had, maybe one person has ever registered by mail. And I’ve read enough feedback on my writing to last a lifetime, so I really don’t need the letters either. It was a fairly easy decision to close the box, which means less mail henceforth.

When I turned in the keys, I was handed a stack of packages that I never bothered to pick up, all of them sent by publicists hoping I’d review their stuff on my website. More fodder for the recycle bin. Henceforth this PR spam will end up in limbo.

When I first started blogging, I thought it was cool that publishers and their publicists would send me free personal development books in the mail, hoping to get a review on my website. But after several years of that, it gets pretty stale. Today, however, I’ll be happy to give them my PO box address.

Alternatively, if you don’t want to close your box, consider recycling it. Open a new box, and redirect your mail there till all the important stuff is shifted over. Then close the old box. This is a good way to periodically reset your spam to zero. I recommend doing it once every few years, or whenever the spam volume gets too annoying.

If having a consistent address is important to you, like if there are lots of places where your address is listed (i.e. old catalogs), then you may be stuck with the same box for a while. I preferred a stable mailing address when I sold shareware games during the 1990s since the mailing address was included in the free demos, which were spread all over the Internet. Changing my box would mean losing some orders from older demos.

Keep Your Mailing Address Off the Internet

While this isn’t always possible for businesses, if you can keep your mailing address off of public Internet sites, it should help reduce the amount of junk mail you receive. I’ve seen plenty of evidence that if you do post a mailing address online, you’re probably going to invite some additional junk mail.

It’s okay to enter your mailing address on online order forms when you want to buy something, such as from Amazon. Just don’t post it where it will be displayed publicly, like on a public discussion forum or on your Facebook page.

Opt Out of Charity Spam

Despite the good they do, many charities, bless their hearts, can be notorious spammers. Donating to certain charities can trigger an onslaught of dozens of give-us-more-money solicitations over the following year or two.

If you don’t want your donation to be treated as spam bait, then when you make a donation, immediately ask the charity to opt you out of any future mailings.

For a while I was doing recurring automatic donations to a popular charity. They’d mail me monthly statements and a few solicitations each year. When I finally canceled those recurring donations, I received an onslaught of solicitous mailings from them. Such annoying behavior isn’t going to motivate me to donate more, but it does convince me to opt out permanently.

I appreciate the good that many charities do, but I’m not interested in opening their solicitations for the rest of my life. It’s easy enough to find a worthy cause when I desire to donate.

Stay Frosty

Be alert for potential sources of junk mail as they arise, and nip them in the bud quickly when you can.

Sometimes when I’d buy gifts for people, I’d get junk mail from the companies I bought from, even if I never bought anything for myself.

One time I bought a gift card to White House | Black Market for my sister via their website. Then I started getting lots of junk mail from them, addressed to me. I would never shop there for myself, but now I will never buy anything from them for anyone.

When you buy something online from a new vendor, ask to be placed on their opt out list right when you order. If you order online, there’s often a “special instructions” or comment box where you can notify them of this.

One thing that gets me a lot is when I make hotel reservations. After my stay, I often start receiving junk mail from the hotel. Seriously? Am I really going to revisit that Hawaii resort right after I just stayed there? Again, this kind of spam has the opposite effect and makes me less likely to return. I have to remind myself to opt out of hotel mailings right when I make the reservation.

Once a family member bought some gifts from Justice (a girl’s clothing store) for my daughter Emily, and the gifts were mailed to my house. I started getting an absolutely ridiculous amount of junk mail from them, addressed to Emily. Finally I had the sense to tell them to stop.

Delegate to an Assistant

Worst case, you could have someone process and screen all your mail for you. I think this should be a last resort, however, and it doesn’t negate any of the above. Why have someone waste their life on pointless busywork when it’s faster and easier to cut off the flow of junk upstream? Don’t try to process spam more quickly. Stop the spam from being sent. Then no one needs to process it.

If you do use an assistant, then have him/her make the calls to reduce your mail to the bare minimum.

Brick Up Your Mailbox?

One of the best Seinfeld episodes is where Kramer decides he wants to stop receiving postal mail. He puts a brick in his mailbox, so the mail carrier can’t deliver any more mail to him. Eventually the Postmaster General has Kramer kidnapped and intimidates him until Kramer agrees to play by the rules and start receiving mail again.

How necessary is postal mail these days?

If the ideal is to receive no unwanted physical mail at all, how close can we get to that? I suppose that if you don’t have an address, such as if you live in an RV, then maybe you could do without mail altogether. But if you do have a physical address, do you think you could someday do the equivalent of putting a brick in your mailbox, so no further mail delivery is possible? You could still receive packages at your door if you want, but no more letters, cards, postcards, magazines, etc.

Does the postal service itself let people opt out?

Physical mail delivery was once a marvel, especially if you lived in Ancient Rome, Persia, or the Mongol Empire. Today it’s a dying technology that’s clearly becoming obsolete.

The U.S. Postal Service is in seriously bad financial shape, so bad that their very survival is in doubt. They raise postage rates, lay people off, and close locations, but they’re still hemorrhaging cash with no end in sight. We’re talking a multi-billion dollar deficit. A major downsizing is inevitable; it’s only a matter of time. If the decision were up to me, I’d either gut the service to the bones or kill it altogether. It’s best to put them out of their misery sooner; delay will be worse.

For any readers who still work in postal mail delivery, I’d start developing new career options sooner rather than later. I don’t think you have much time left. No union can save your job when the math is against you.

* * *

For the purposes of mail reduction, I suggest doing about 30 days of collection first, coupled with immediate use of the various opt-out services above. Then at the end of those 30 days, go through your stack item by item to make your phone calls to individual spammers, either in a single marathon session, or spread over the course of a week.

Then mark your calendar to do another round of mail reduction every 6 months or so. That should massively reduce the amount of unwanted mail you receive for the rest of your life.

It may take a few hours to complete these actions, but I think you’ll agree that the payoff is worth it. Would you rather spend 8 months of your life opening junk mail?

Even if you only apply some of the steps above, I think a 75% reduction within 60 days is an attainable goal, and I’m sure some will achieve a 90%+ reduction. If you really push it though, you should be able to reduce your incoming mail to almost nothing. Don’t waste your time processing crap that never should have been sent to you. Go have a life!

If you do discover a way to completely brick up your mailbox, please let me know… if you can figure out how to contact me, that is.

For the past several months, I’ve been going through a social reboot. This involves consciously reassessing my social life and deciding what connections and social habits to maintain and what to change.

But this year I’ve decided to go further with this process and declare outright social bankruptcy. This is an area of my life that was far enough off track that changing it for the better is closer to starting over from scratch than making modifications to an existing structure. It’s more analogous to changing careers than it is to tweaking an existing career.

I could see that my social life was becoming exceedingly unbalanced. It was a source of many stimulating connections, but the overall big picture wasn’t working very well.

While many people have trouble with physical clutter piling up, the main source of clutter in my life has been social clutter, most of which flowed into my life as a result of having a popular website/blog and having many open doors on the Internet through which people could easily connect with me.

Initially I thought that being so accessible was a good thing. I liked having an open door policy. To do otherwise seemed like it would be too cold and aloof.

In the beginning that open door policy worked okay, but too much of a good thing can eventually become a curse.

A Gift or a Curse?

Imagine if people starting coming to your house and bringing you gifts because they want to express their appreciation.

At first, you may receive their gifts with gratitude. How nice of them. How lucky you are to receive such abundance.

Now imagine that the gifts keep coming, year after year and with increasing frequency.

Eventually you start seeing patterns in the gifts. The same types of items appear dozens, then hundreds of times. What was once a delightful surprise now becomes routine and predictable.

Soon you stop bothering to open some of the gifts. You can tell what they are from the outside packaging. You don’t need what’s inside since you’ve received similar items many times before. You may still appreciate the sentiment, but the gifts themselves no longer hold much value to you.

You start running out of space to store the gifts. They pile up. You shove them in closets and fill your garage with them. And they just keep coming.

You can reasonably expect that this pattern will continue for many more years to come. It isn’t going to stop on its own. You begin to dread the treadmill you find yourself on.

All the while, people follow up to ask you about the gifts you received. At first you really are appreciative. Then you become indifferent. Then you may feel resentful. You may try to feign appreciation from behind that resentment in order to be polite, but it isn’t always easy. After a sufficient amount of time elapses, the gifts are entirely unwanted. As new gift bringers arrive, you stop answering the door as often.

Due to the asymmetrical nature of these interactions, those individual gift givers can’t see any problem with it. They always feel they’re doing a good deed. And so if you aren’t appreciative each time, they quickly jump to the conclusion that there must be something wrong with you.

So what do you do?

You could ask people to stop bringing gifts, but whom do you tell if it’s different people each time?

You could hire someone to process the gifts for you, but why pay someone to process what you don’t even want? This would also do a disservice to the gift givers since you’d never personally receive and appreciate their gifts. They probably wouldn’t have brought the gifts if they expected their gifts would merely be processed by an assistant. They intended the gifts to be personal.

Social connections are like gifts. In small quantities they’re precious, and it’s easy to appreciate them. In vast quantities, however, they can become a curse.

I hit that curse level a long time ago and did my best to manage it, but eventually I realized that it was a no-win situation, and I had to make some fundamental changes. I couldn’t just get better at processing the gifts that arrived. I had to stop the gifts from showing up altogether. I had to eliminate the curse aspects and get back to a more reasonable level of interaction.

Declaring Social Bankruptcy

It took a while to accept it, but eventually I realized I had to declare social bankruptcy. I’d gone too far down a path that wasn’t working. I could see that it was time to get off that path entirely.

I began to think about what kind of social life I’d create for myself these days if I had the opportunity to start over completely from scratch. I imagined that nobody on earth knew who I was. What if I didn’t have email… or a website… or any social media pages… or a phone number?

What would I consciously decide to add back? What would I avoid recreating?

I still like writing, so I’d keep that. I like speaking too, so I’d recreate that as well.

But there are some items I wouldn’t recreate, at least not in the same way they’re present in my life today.

One of those things would be email. I’d keep it for some very limited usage, but I wouldn’t use email as my primary business communication tool. I’d reduce my email usage by at least 90% and check it maybe once or twice a week, with perhaps 15 minutes of usage time per week. I wouldn’t have an assistant process a bunch of messages for me. I’d set it up so hardly anyone would message me. I’d only receive emails that I wanted to receive, from people I wanted to be able to email me.

Another thing I wouldn’t recreate would be online interactions with people regarding my articles, including comments, questions, and discussions. Reading feedback can be stimulating at times, but I don’t find it inspiring or fulfilling, and it certainly isn’t necessary. Life itself gives me all the feedback I require. It’s fine if people want to discuss and share what I’ve posted on their own, but I don’t need to participate in those discussions. By the time I’ve posted something, I’ve already moved on to the next thing. For me writing is a process of letting go. To write is to release. If I get involved in discussions about my past work, my attention is pulled back to where I’ve been, and I experience greater levels of attachment. I’d rather keep my attention on where I am and where I’m going.

If I’m going to discuss anything work-related, it’s more interesting to discuss what I’m inspired to explore next. It’s easier for me — and more fulfilling as well — to have such discussions with friends face to face. So again the online element is superfluous.

In the long run, my open door approach to connecting with readers was a bust. I tried modifying the parameters of that open door — for years — but eventually I had to close that door altogether. Life is a lot simpler without all that social clutter.

Closing those doors (quitting Facebook, shutting down the forums, disabling my online contact form, etc) was tough to do at first, but now I’m far enough along with this contraction process that I wish I’d done this years ago.

I’m also revamping the way I use email, including killing off old email addresses and reserving email for a much lower volume of communication henceforth.

Obligation vs. Freedom

There are several themes that run through this social rebooting process. One involves eliminating social obligations and expectations and replacing them with freedom of choice.

My social life has been overburdened with perceived obligations. People who have a social connection with me frequently expect that our connection entitles them to something from me, such as a reply to their emails or advice when they request it.

In small quantities that isn’t a problem, but in the quantities I’ve experienced this, it’s too far over on the curse side.

So as part of declaring social bankruptcy, I’m erasing any social debt people feel I owe them as a result of our past connections.

Feeling obligated to live up to other people’s expectations isn’t how I wish to manage my social life. I wish to experience a social life based on freedom of choice by all involved, where no one feels they have the right to leverage our connection to obligate the other person.

Freedom must still be balanced with responsibility, so if I’ve freely chosen to obligate myself in some way, such as entering a business contract or making a verbal agreement with someone, I’ll honor that of course. But I’m not going to let those unspoken obligations creep back into my social life, where people feel they’re entitled to something from me just because they exist in my reality.

If certain people can’t handle this and wish to complain about it, I’m not going to maintain a serious connection with them. The types of people I like interacting with already feel similarly anyway, so I’m not losing anything I value here.

Online vs. Offline

The second shift involves doing more of what fulfills me and less of what doesn’t fulfill me.

I love connecting with people face to face. Occasional video-Skyping is okay too. But typing individual messages to people has grown pretty stale. And if I have a lot of messages to read and reply to, that just feels burdensome.

So I’m deliberately axing almost all of my one-on-one communication via the Internet. And I’m replacing it with more face to face social interaction.

I’m making this change not only for personal socializing but for business networking as well. I may use email to help maintain some connections, but I’m essentially closing the door to new business connections that arrive by email. New business contacts will have to meet me in person, and that will essentially mean they’ll have to come through organically via my existing social network. It will be exceedingly difficult for cold callers to reach me personally.

Incompatible vs. Compatible

The third shift has to do with the types of people that I connect with on a regular basis.

The bulk of people who’ve gotten in touch with me in the past were readers of my blog, Internet marketers, and the press. In small doses these interactions are normally fine, but in larger quantities it can get a little crazy.

As part of declaring social bankruptcy, I felt it wise to close the door on these types of interactions via the Internet, so I could create some space to reassess my social life without so many distractions piling up.

During this quiet time, I realized that I didn’t wish to recreate the reader-based interactions. These are too often interactions where people put me on a pedestal and place themselves on a perceived lower tier as they interact with me. It’s not a big deal when it’s a temporary thing like during a workshop weekend, but it’s not something I like having in my life on a daily basis. These interactions provide little value to me, and they encourage me to keep revisiting the past instead of focusing on new challenges. If you think my decision to cut these people off is selfish, that’s because it is.

Sometimes I’ve even said to people, “Please don’t do the fanboy thing with me.” While I’m sure some people draw energy from having others look up to them, I find it very unnatural when adults behave like that towards me. I prefer it when people connect with me as equals.

Regarding Internet marketers who approach me primarily because they want something from me, I’m not going to lose any sleep over shedding those connections. These types of approaches are very common online, but they’re much less frequent in person. And in person it’s much easier to help the person get past their fake salesy persona and behave a bit more naturally.

Connecting with the press might seem to be a wise door to keep open for business reasons, but after doing so many interviews, I don’t see much value in continuing the practice. Mainstream journalists and the publications they represent are too often a mismatch for my message. They have an overwhelming tendency to want to reduce everything to cutesy sound bites, and they frequently get the sound bites wrong anyway. These people are almost invariably over-stressed and harried, so they can only crank out incredibly shallow work that provides little or no long-term value. Most publications of this nature don’t provide a compatible medium for a message about conscious living.

So as I declare social bankruptcy on these types of connections, what’s left?

I thought about the kinds of friends I want to keep in my life, as well as new friends I’d like to attract. These include people with qualities and values such as:

1. Freedom – people who maintain free and flexible lifestyles and have control over their schedules (can’t connect with people who aren’t available)
2. Self-Sufficiency - high-functioning people who can take care of themselves (not needy, clingy, or high maintenance)
3. Happiness – people who are generally happy and fulfilled with their lives
4. Growth – people who value growth above security (security-minded people are very boring)
5. Courage – people who seek to identify and face their fears; people who are following their “path with a heart”
6. Offbeat – people whom others might label as weird, quirky, or unusual (I like social rebels; the social conformists don’t seem particularly sane)

There are lots of people in my life who will claim to value these qualities, but not as many can claim to be living them. People who are living up to their values tend to have a certain peacefulness about them that’s a joy to connect with.

I’ve been maintaining many partial matches in my social network, i.e. people who have enough compatibility to create a connection with me but not enough to maintain a mutually fulfilling relationship in the long run. These partial matches are relative dead ends though, and they crowd out more compatible connections.

As part of this bankruptcy process, I’m reassessing each connection in my social network as if it’s a brand new connection opportunity that just showed up for the first time. I’m letting go of past social baggage with certain people and asking myself if it makes sense to include them in my social map today. At the same time, I’m raising my standards with respect to the types of connections I’ll invite in and maintain.

Quantity to Quality

In previous years I’ve had lots of relatively shallow connections in my life and a handful of deep ones. But virtually all the joy and fulfillment comes from the deeper connections. So I’ve decided to release most of those shallow connections and invest more time and energy in creating and maintaining deeper connections but with fewer people.

I don’t find it difficult to create and maintain deeper connections, but when there’s too much social clutter in my life, it keeps me flailing around in the shallow end of the pool more often than I’d like.

Instead of maintaining a large but loose social network, I’m dumping that model and replacing it with a much smaller, tighter social network. I seek fewer friends, but deeper and more compatible connections.

Having an extensive social network with loose ties with lots of people may seem like a good thing to some people, but I haven’t found much fulfillment in that model. Breadth is no substitute for depth.

I think the main mistake I made here was assuming that having a bigger funnel at the top would result in deeper connections at the bottom. It doesn’t work that way in practice, however. Shallow connections rarely evolve into deeper ones. Deep connections frequently avoid the funnel altogether. When truly compatible people show up, we tend to click right away — within a matter of hours. For the most part, either we click right away, or we don’t. There is no funnel.

As part of this process, I’ve been going through my Google Contacts and making liberal use of the delete function. I figure that if I haven’t contacted someone in 6 months or more, I probably don’t need their contact info.

Having fewer contacts to maintain simplifies my life and makes it easier to focus on connections I wish to maintain. If I ever really need the info for a deleted contact, I can always get it through some other means, like searching my email archives or requesting it from someone.

After a few passes, I was able to reduce my contacts down to 64 people. My goal was to get it down to 30 or less. With a couple more passes, I got it down to 28. Smile.

I may gradually build it back up to around 40 or so, but I’m in no rush. It’s nice to see the whole list fit on one screen for the first time ever. No scrollbar.

Contraction, Then Expansion

Having been through a financial bankruptcy many years ago, I can tell you that declaring bankruptcy isn’t such a terrible thing. When you go bankrupt, you shed what clearly isn’t working for you. For me it was a very liberating experience.

I find this social bankruptcy process equally liberating. It’s obviously not the same thing as a financial bankruptcy, but the energetic effect is similar. Old obligations and expectations are released. Hope and optimism replace feelings of overwhelm and disappointment.

I’m looking forward to rebuilding a positive and supportive social life this year, practically from the ground up. Having such an active social life for so many years, even if it wasn’t particularly fulfilling, gave me a lot of clarity about what I want to experience in this part of my life instead.

Initially I hoped to transition directly from where I was to where I wanted to go. But I couldn’t get that approach to work. The old patterns were too strong, and I didn’t have enough clarity about where to go next. It’s like being in a job you don’t like, but you’re still unsure about what you might do instead or how to make it work. You have to quit the old job first, break free of its distractions and conditioning effects, and take some reflective time to get in touch with what you’ve learned and what you want. Then you can take steps to create something new. There may be some negative side effects to this approach, but they’re worth it. Staying stuck in a no-win situation is worse.

In a similar vein, I eventually accepted I had to undergo a social contraction first before I’d have any hope of creating something better. I couldn’t transition directly from planet A to planet B because planet A’s gravity was too strong. I had to leave planet A behind first, then explore a bit in order to identify planet B and plot a course to it.

I’m in that exploratory phase now, which is a refreshing change. As I shared above, I have more clarity about what I want to experience next, but I’m in no rush to get there. I’m still shedding bits and pieces of the old planet A, and I feel very relieved as I watch it recede further into the past. My social life is quieter and simpler than it’s been in years, and I’m taking advantage of this peaceful period to get back in touch with myself.

Ho’oponopono It

When I was at the Transformational Leadership Council retreat in Kona, Hawaii last week, we did an interesting Ho’oponopono exercise that included writing an exhaustive list of anyone and anything from the past that we still felt a lingering attachment to. At the end of the exercise, we tore up our lists, a symbolic way of shedding those attachments. This doesn’t mean shedding those people from one’s life. It just means releasing any unconscious attachments to them, so you can make a freer and more conscious choice about how to relate (or not relate) to them thereafter. At least that was my understanding of the exercise.

At the time I did that exercise, I didn’t sense that anything special had happened. It was a nice gesture but not particularly transformational for me. However, when I returned to Vegas several days later, I could tell that something had shifted in my attitudes towards certain people. I could more easily distinguish the aspects of those connections that I was freely inviting vs. those aspects that had become riddled with unconscious expectations and obligations. I felt a greater sense of freedom to relate on the basis of choice while releasing any lingering loyalty to the expectation side. I felt more empowered to relate to people as my true self without worrying about their reactions.

I think that deciding to stop participating in traditional holiday gift exchanges as I shared in yesterday’s post was one result of this Ho’oponopono process. I might have gotten around to it eventually, but I feel this process helped speed things along. I was able to get it done without worrying about other people’s reactions. I saw that it was more important to be true to myself and stop trying to satisfy other people’s expectations of me.

As I allow myself to explore this delightfully peaceful space of fresh possibilities, I’m already noticing new doors opening. Part of me wants to dive in and explore some of them, while another part of me wants to hold off and enjoy the silence a bit longer. I’m sure I’ll begin to explore some of those alternative paths soon enough, but the most important thing for me right now is to explore in an unattached, noncommittal way. I want to experience a social life where each relationship feels like a fresh choice made anew, not an obligation to remain loyal to the past.

When it’s obvious that some part of your life isn’t working, stop. Release what isn’t working. Then choose another path. People will squawk at you, but you’ll be happier on the other side.