The Simple Test that Helps Me Avoid Spending Time with the Wrong People
I like the time that I spend with other people.
I am rarely socially exhausted. I am always excited to see them, and I am often sad to leave. I like everyone I hang out with, and I never waste time on people I find uninteresting.
Fortunately, getting to this point can require only a simple test.
The Vampire Test
In Show Your Work!, Austin Kleon defines his Vampire Test.
The ideal social relationship is one that provides meaning and emotional satisfaction. Regardless of the extent of your social battery, the people you spend time with should energize and excite you. They should not make you moody or miserable.
The Vampire Test weeds out these poor relationships by identifying which of your acquaintances are vampires. A vampire is someone who repeatedly leaves you feeling depleted and dissatisfied. Instead of bringing pleasure to your mood and mind, they chip off your energy and take away your time.
Like the fictional vampire, they drain you.
Ideally, none of your relationships involve a vampire, and your social time is spent with non-vampires only. Inevitably, though, there are exceptions: friends and family members who matter to you despite their tendency to leave you feeling drained. In these cases, the solution can be to reduce rather than remove your time with them.
Either way, by doing this test, you get to distinguish between the ones who take away time and energy, and the ones who make that time feel valuable.
The Friends I Left — and the Friends I Gained
Back in the past, some of my own friends were vampires.
- One person would spend our hangouts pressing their own stories and issues and interrupting me, eventually making me feel used and unseen
- Another person would spend our conversations talking much more than they listened, making me always give them more than I received in turn
- A third person would be completely inoffensive and very kind, but always felt dull and unintriguing to me, through no fault of their own
I would always come home from these meetings feeling drained and tired.
Later, I would engage with other, less vampiric people to reclaim the energy I had lost. Friends and family members whose presence often brought comfort or excitement. With these non-vampires, I rarely lost energy, and I felt like I was winning rather than wasting my time.
It is important not to misunderstand the Vampire Test, though.
The test is not about removing imperfect connections from your life. All relationships hold conflict, turbulence, and negative emotions over certain periods of time. What makes someone a true vampire is not the presence of these pains, but rather the repeatedly tired and lackluster feel that follows their company.
In other words:
Stick to the people that generally leave you feeling excited and satisfied. Leave (or de-prioritize) the people who take away that energy or comfort.
Stay where the sun shines, and the vampires cannot drain you of life.
