Opinion

Here’s why I say no to making plans six weeks in advance. More people should try it

It has become quite common for people around my age, in their mid to late 20s and early 30s, to cultivate these impossibly bulging calendars. It’s not for me

A friend of a friend has a rule: if you are invited to anything and you wouldn’t want to go tonight, say no. I admire the sentiment, but I find my own moods far more capricious. I might want to go tonight, I might not in three weeks. Photograph: Emilio Parra Doiztua/New York Times
Rachel Connolly
Mon Sept 09 2024 - 06:00

I almost never have plans in six weeks on a Tuesday. Still, if anyone asks me to agree to meet them then, I will probably just ignore their text. Maybe I’ll reply: Yeah probably, let’s check closer to the time.

But agree to a firm plan? No. It has become quite common for people around my age, in their 20s or 30s, to cultivate these impossibly bulging calendars, full to the brim weeks in advance. I’m not exactly sure when this started. But by now it is a well enough established phenomenon that I often see memes referring to it. Something like “Trying to see your friend in a big city is just sending a list of dates months away back and forth forever, until one of you dies.”

A few years ago I decided, simply, “no”. I refuse to participate. I find the whole idea of it claustrophobic and dreary. I don’t make plans more than about a week in advance unless it’s a birthday or a wedding. I have heard other versions of my rule. A friend of a friend has one: if you are invited to anything and you wouldn’t want to go tonight, say no. I admire the sentiment, but I find my own moods far more capricious. I might want to go tonight, I might not in three weeks.

I realised I find it too hard to tell what I might like to do on a particular Tuesday. There are too many variables: what mood I will be in, how work will have gone, what the weather will be.

READ MORE

Once, for example, I had planned to meet a friend for a drink after a day in the office, and my skirt happened to rip clean in half as I walked to the printer. I could never have foreseen that I’d need to spend most of that day wearing my shirt teamed with a pair of gym shorts, and that I wouldn’t fancy hitting the town in them later. But that was the circumstance I found myself in. There is just too much to try to predict.

There is almost no social occasion you truly do have to appear at. Nobody will die.

Mostly, I would not be beset by tragedies such as this one. But I’d find that, as a distantly made plan for a dinner catch-up crept closer, I would greet its approach with mounting dread. My energy was wrong that week to see that particular person. I was hungover. I was tired. A better option had presented itself. And by that, I don’t mean a glitzy affair I wanted to elbow an old friend aside in order to attend. But simply something I felt I’d enjoy more right at that moment. Say, on a draining week, I would rather see a calmer soul than a chaotic party animal. Both have their moments – it doesn’t make either less valuable as a friend to me.

Because this is the thing I realised. I wanted to organise my social life primarily around enjoying myself, which to me means having the exact kind of night I want to be having. And why not? Isn’t that what a social life was always really supposed to be for?

[ Young and Promising: millennials with a real lust for life ]

Recently, I was talking to a friend I hadn’t seen for a while and she said something like: “I haven’t seen anyone I like for ages, I’ve been doing stuff I have to do with old schoolfriends.” I doubt she truly dislikes these people. I think she meant more that she’d let her life fill up with events she felt a sense of duty about, rather than a desire to attend.

“Don’t go to the schoolfriends’ stuff for a bit then,” I said. “Oh no, no!” She protested. “I have to. I can’t miss these things.”

But the thing is, you can. There is almost no social occasion you truly do have to appear at. Nobody will die. Probably everyone will forget you aren’t there after an hour or so.

Really, I sort of wonder if a desire to avoid accepting this reality is what sits under all these “full to the brim” schedules. I don’t really believe it’s necessary for people about my age to manage our time so rigidly. We mostly don’t have kids. We mostly work jobs in which, even if we have busy periods, we’re hardly the linchpin of the company. My experience is that nobody seems to really be as busy, as booked up, as they claim to be.

I remember, a little while ago, having a drink with a friend who is a few years younger than I am. She was complaining about all this scheduling business. It made her life feel “stuffy” and “boring”, she said. I told her just not to bother with it, I don’t. I explained that I usually just don’t reply to messages about plans months in advance.

“What?!” She said. “How do you see anyone?”

[ I don’t use social media and of course I sometimes wonder if the cost is worth the benefit ]

I explained it tends to work the same way I had arranged my drink with her. I ask: Are you about this week? The other person says: Yes, Wednesday.

All those calendars which seemed so rigid, so impenetrably blocked out a month in advance, always look a lot more porous up close.

And everyone starts to learn that I’m free quite often if they text at short notice. And that maybe I’m harder to arrange to see in advance, but if I’ve made a plan, it’s for an occasion I’ll genuinely want to be at. I won’t be tired or grumpy, or filled with manic energy after a huge project, attempting to turn a quiet dinner into a giant rager. If anyone finds it a little frustrating that I can’t be blocked into a schedule, I think that more than compensates.

Rachel Connolly is a writer from Belfast. Her first novel Lazy City was published last year