Time Recycle

(Audio Deep Dive English; Audio Deep Dive Bangla)

We are now 15 days away from the "new year" and thankfully the initial salvo of mass-mailed good wishes - fired off through digital networks with military precision and emotional emptiness - has finally died down and we are back to the routine "Morning" and other such meaningless statements on WhatsApp and other platforms. It is time to confront a truth so unromantic that it barely qualifies as content: none of our life narratives are about to change in any significant way. Unless something catastrophic intervenes. You dying. An immediate family member dying. A global war. Another pandemic. Short of these minor inconveniences, the story will trudge on obediently. We will continue to make the same memories, carefully preserving the ones that flatter us and quietly deleting the ones that require accountability. We will ignore the same people - not loudly, not dramatically, but with the sophisticated silence of unread messages and “how are you” conversations that will never again be opened. Ignoring, after all, has become a skill, refined by platforms designed to make absence look accidental. But we will not let these people go entirely. That would be inefficient. Instead, we will keep them in back pockets - folded neatly into the narrative like emergency tools. Not needed now, but too useful to discard. Old friends, former intimates, professional allies, emotional stand-ins. People preserved not for who they are, but for the role they might be asked to play if the storyline suddenly requires warmth, validation, memory, or credibility. These back-pocket humans will remain just close enough to be summoned, but never close enough to really matter. Their presence will be conditional, their relevance activated only when the narrative experiences a temporary gap. They exist as narrative convenience - emotional insurance policies against loneliness, boredom, or a sudden need to feel known. Meanwhile, we will pursue new connections with cautious enthusiasm, fully aware that they too are being auditioned rather than embraced. We will smile, exchange histories, promise continuity, all while internally assessing how expendable they might become when the plot shifts. We will do the same work, chase the same upgrades, declare the same ambitions with renewed annual optimism. This year will be different, we will insist - despite a decade of empirical evidence to the contrary. But ritual matters, even when belief has expired. We will suddenly elevate certain relationships to “top priority” status, investing in them with theatrical intensity, while efficiently erasing decades of shared experience elsewhere. Memory, like bandwidth, must be allocated strategically. For those of us well past the age where reinvention is anything more than cosmetic, change will arrive as a mild variation on familiar patterns. Same life, different arrangement. Fewer illusions. In the end, what will matter most is whether the fundamental human need - to be needed, not merely tolerated or stored - finds fulfillment. For most people, it won’t. Not really. Not sustainably. So the realistic goal is modest: a serviceable collection of memories. Enough to suggest a life was lived. Enough to distract from the realization that we were often optional characters in other people’s stories - kept close enough to call, far enough to ignore. And perhaps that is the quiet, unspoken truth beneath all those cheerful digital wishes: not that a new chapter is beginning, but that the old one will continue - with the same cast, the same omissions, and the same carefully maintained back pockets. And it then comes down to what Whodini calls friends, "Friends/How many of us have them?"