Quite a lot of writing about random chat talks about “making real connections.” I’d gently push back on that as the right goal.
Real connection is a thing that happens sometimes between two people who’ve been around each other for a while. It’s not really a thing you can aim for in a five-minute call with a stranger. If you go into a call looking for connection, the call goes through a weird filter where you’re evaluating the other person against an unspoken bar. They can usually feel it. It’s a strange energy and most people will leave it.
The better target is a good call. A good call is one where you said some things you found interesting, the other person said some things you found interesting back, and you both got off feeling slightly better than you got on. None of that requires connection in the deep sense. It just requires both of you taking the conversation as it is and not as something it’s supposed to lead to.
Friendships, when they form, form from the good-call baseline, not from a connection-hunt. If you have ten good calls with the same person across a couple of weeks, you’ve got a friend. If you have one call where you both performed connection at each other really hard, you’ve had an exhausting hour and you probably won’t talk again. The performative version doesn’t survive into the second call.
The other thing worth saying: most calls aren’t going to be either. Most calls are fine. You talked, you said your bit, the queue moved on. That’s not a failed connection. It’s just a call. Treating ordinary calls as failures is what burns people out of the platform after a few weeks. Treating them as ordinary is what lets you keep showing up.
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