Care or don’t – make up your mind

Let me ask you something. Let’s say you’re talking to your friend Bob, and that you and Bob are mutual friends with another person, we’ll call this person Jane. Now Bob sees Jane more than you do, and you know it’s Jane’s birthday soon. So you tell Bob, “Tell Jane happy birthday for me.” People seem to do this sort of thing all the time without really thinking about it, and it bothers me. It bothers me because I wonder if the people who say this actually truly expect their message to be delivered. I’ve noticed that when somebody says this to me, I almost never remember to deliver the message. Maybe other people are more diligent than I about such things, but really there’s nothing in it for you, so I assume the general rate of message delivery in the population is about the same as mine. When there’s no incentive to take some action, nor any ramifications for not acting, you’re just not going to go out of your way to do it. It’s not like two weeks down the road you’re going to call Bob to find out if he really did wish Jane a happy birthday from you. And even if you do, if Bob says “Why yes, yes I did,” are you really going to then call Jane to check on Bob’s integrity when if you had really cared about Jane getting wished a happy birthday in the first place, you’d have gotten off your lazy ass and done it yourself instead of sending your wishes by proxy. This whole idea seems like a waste of hot air to me, unless for some crazy reason you wish to impress on Bob that you care about Jane just enough to think of her, but not quite enough to actually take any action yourself. Because that’s the message you’re sending if you went through me. Quite different from the “Happy Birthday” you probably intended.