How you doing?
Lockdown due to widespread Covid 19 has imposed many constraints and restrictions on us. However, the ubiquitous internet has overridden many of these constraints and help some of us not only work from home, or entertain ourselves while confined to our dwellings, but also to stay in touch with our family and friends.
Covid 19 has made me realize that even those in my peer group (many of them) who have done better than me financially and in their career are also under lockdown and living under similar constraints and restrictions. This is a global phenomenon and it doesn’t matter how much wealth you have or how smart you are or how healthy you are or how successful you are, you are at risk when the whole world is fighting a pandemic.
After connecting with some of my close friends, I decided to cast a wider net and connect with anyone and everyone I haven’t talked to in a long time and check how they’re dealing with this situation. Here’s the message I typed out on Facebook messenger:
“Hey <name>, how’ve you been? :) Hope everyone and everything is fine at your place. :)”
I received responses from about 90% of the messages, rest 10% messages were unseen (maybe they are inactive Facebook users). Following were the different kinds of reactions I received (along with percentage distribution in bracket):
- Delight. “Hey Abhishek, it is so good to hear from you. Its been a long time since we last talked. How’ve you been?” (~45%)
- Gratefulness. “Hey Abhishek. Thanks for checking on me. I’m doing good. How’ve you been?” (~40%)
- Meh. “Hey Abhishek. We’re fine. How’re you?” (~5%)
About 20% of the people falling in category 1 or 2 also share their contact number and ask me to share my number with them, connect with them on WhatsApp or call them.
This distribution shows that irrespective of the impression I have on them, most of them were happy after reading my message (asking about their well-being) and reciprocated the sentiments.
I think I must have messaged about 300+ people, maybe more, since last ten days. I had opened my Facebook friends list and typed out messages to those I felt like talking to. I told my wife to stop me in case I overdo it, then ignored her when she tried to stop me! At one point I was at it for nearly 4 hours. Even though it was exhausting, I enjoyed getting in touch with my friends and acquaintances.
Bonus: I discovered that few of my friends also shared some of my current interests (such as music composition and history of India) and I’ve been talking with about that since last one week.
