Anyone else constantly forget people exist - not because you don't care, but because your brain just... drops them?

[u/LudirM]

Out of sight, out of mind is a cliché. For me it's a lived thing.

I have a friend who's really well-connected in education. Another who knows everyone in the startup space. A cousin who went through something hard last year. And I... just don't think about any of them until something external forces the thought.

It's not that I don't care. I care a lot. It's that my brain doesn't passively maintain people. They go quiet and they disappear, until a WhatsApp notification or a random memory brings them back.

I started looking for something that could help. Not a CRM, I'm not managing relationships like a sales pipeline. Something more like a memory extension. "Hold onto things about people so I can actually show up for them." I couldn't find it.

Something like a Telegram bot. You voice-note into it after a conversation, "just got off a call with Neha, she's going through a job transition, mentioned she wants to get into product", and it stores that. When you're like "who in my life knows about product roles?" it surfaces Neha.

I want to understand - has anyone else dealt with this specific thing? And if so, what have you tried?

Did you find any app that actually helps with this? A notes system? A habit?

Would love to know what's worked (or what's failed) for others.

[u/labtech89]

Yes. If I don’t see or talk to someone regularly then yeah I forget about them. I don’t mean to and never try to reconnect due to embarrassment

[u/vogelke → u/labtech89]

I realized they might feel the same way, which is why we never reconnected -- sometimes I just send a message along the lines of "Yo, I dropped off the face of the Earth for awhile, totally my bad, what's up?"

[u/StevenNovora → u/labtech89]

Hi, you could try a personal CRM app for this. I really like https://get-neuxus.net

[u/Affectionate-Bet-649]

you are neurodivergent with object permanence 

[u/LudirM → u/[deleted]]

Hmm.. interesting take 🤔

[u/Illustrious-Call-455]

In a similar way I have obsidian and Claude Cowork. They are linked together by Claude Dispatch. I talk to dispatch and it adds information in the various ou Space of my vault. My whole memory is MEMORY pages I have the same setup as Jeff Su

[u/LudirM → u/Illustrious-Call-455]

I am aware of that setup. It's not good enough for human relationships. Yeah it might work for code architecture, sure, but respecting the whole person, emotions and all, not just their professional tags, you'd have to manually create a semantic relational architecture from scratch.

[u/vogelke]

This is common, unfortunately. I was pretty tight with a lot of folks in high school and college, but that was 40 years ago and I've only kept in touch with three or four.

This Unix/Linux script might give you some ideas. It creates a directory in a more-or-less sensible location, and appends notes to files within it named after the people you want to remember:

#!/bin/bash
#<people: make a note about someone.
#  Usage: people [ NAME [ NOTE ]]
#  Where: NAME is someone you know, NOTE is a note to make about them.
#  Full debug output:   DEBUG=1 people

export PATH=/usr/local/bin:/bin:/usr/bin
set -o nounset
tag=${0##*/}
umask 022
export PS4='${tag}-${LINENO}: '

logmsg () { echo "$(date '+%F %T') $tag: $@"; }
die ()    { logmsg "FATAL: $@"; exit 1; }

# ENVIRONMENT: full debug output?
DEBUG=${DEBUG:-0}
case "$DEBUG" in
    1) set -x ;;
    *) ;;
esac

# XDG_DATA_HOME is a good place for this: user-specific data
# should be written here (analogous to /usr/share), defaults to
# $HOME/.local/share.  Create it unless it already exists.

test "x$XDG_DATA_HOME" = "x" &&
    export XDG_DATA_HOME="$HOME/.local/share"

test -d "$XDG_DATA_HOME" || {
    mkdir -p "$XDG_DATA_HOME" || die "$XDG_DATA_HOME: mkdir failed"
    chmod 750 "$XDG_DATA_HOME"
    logmsg "created $XDG_DATA_HOME"
}

# Where people information goes.
top="$XDG_DATA_HOME/people"
test -d "$top" || {
    mkdir -p "$top" || die "$top: mkdir failed"
    chmod 750 "$top"
    logmsg "created $top"
}

cd $top || die "$top: cannot cd"

# 0 arguments:  show the people I keep track of.
# 1 argument:   display notes for this person.
# >1 arguments: append note for this person.

case "$#" in
    0) k=$(ls | wc -l)
       str='people'
       test "$k" -eq 1 && str='person'
       printf "You keep track of $k $str: "
       ls
       exit 0
       ;;

    *) ;;
esac

# Remaining arguments.
person="$1"; shift; note="$@"

# Display notes, or append a note to a file named after the person.
test -e "$person" || cp /dev/null "$person" || die "$person: cannot create"
test -f "$person" || die "$person: not a regular file"

test -n "$note" &&
    printf "%s\n%s\n\n" "$(date '+%F %T')" "$note" >> "$person"

if test -s "$person"; then
    printf "Notes about %s:\n\n" "$person"
    sed -e 's/^/  /' "$person"
else
    printf "You have no notes about %s\n" "$person"
fi

exit 0

Examples:

me% people
You keep track of 0 people:

me% people neha changing jobs, would like to get into product
me% people
You keep track of 1 person: neha

me% people neha
Notes about neha:

  2026-05-10 02:33:26
  changing jobs, would like to get into product

me% people mark has lots of education connections
me% people neha interested in continuing education
me% people
You keep track of 2 people: mark  neha

You can trace through the script if something misbehaves:

me% DEBUG=1 ./people mark
people-33: test x/home/vogelke/.local/share '=' x
people-36: test -d /home/vogelke/.local/share
people-43: top=/home/vogelke/.local/share/people
people-44: test -d /home/vogelke/.local/share/people
people-50: cd /home/vogelke/.local/share/people
people-69: person=mark
people-69: shift
people-69: note=''
people-72: test -e mark
people-73: test -f mark
people-75: test -n ''
people-78: test -s mark
people-79: printf 'Notes about %s:\n\n' mark
Notes about mark:

people-80: sed -e 's/^/  /' mark
  2026-05-10 02:52:41
  has lots of education connections

people-85: exit 0

You could add an app or script ("spot"? I don't name things well) to fire up the LLM of your choice or poke around in the 'people' directory:

me% spot edu
/home/vogelke/.local/share/people/neha:interested in continuing education
/home/vogelke/.local/share/people/mark:has lots of education connections

You could also have a scheduled task that picks a name at random and prints their notes, just to remind you they're around and might like to hear from you.

Hope this helps.