Nat Locke: If you’re cancelling plans remember nobody has gastro that often and if your dog is sick, own a dog

It’s one of life’s great paradoxes that two of the most soul satisfying things you can do are: 1. spend quality time with close friends and 2. cancel plans to spend time with close friends. In rather unsurprising news, a recent study (someone’s doing great things with their HECS debt, clearly) has confirmed that 30 per cent of Australians have admitted to lying or making fake plans to avoid a social engagement. And when you break it down by generation and gender, a massive 51 per cent of gen Z women coughed up to it. This either means more gen Z women tell the truth — about lying, that is — or more gen Z women hate their friends. It’s hard to tell. Now, hand on heart, I can say I have definitely done this. There are lots of reasons why, but mostly it’s because I live in a perpetual state of exhaustion due to the series of alarms that begin at 4am every weekday morning. So, occasionally, when I have made a commitment some weeks earlier, thinking I might be up for an evening of frivolity on a random Wednesday night, only to discover that I am incapable of removing myself from the couch at the appointed time, let alone being capable of doing my hair or putting a face on or ironing something to wear or driving several suburbs away or finding somewhere to park or talking to someone. You get the drift. It can be a lot. So — very rarely — I might have told a little white lie to avoid the social occasion. And if you are going to lie about something to get out of a social commitment, at least be convincing. Don’t go into too much detail. Don’t implicate other people, especially if they are unaware of your deception. Don’t repeatedly use the same excuse. Nobody gets food poisoning that often. And if you’re going to claim that your dog is sick, at least own a dog. Or, you know, be honest. I guess that’s an approach that might work too. Of course, actually hanging out with your friends is also an excellent way to pass the time. I spent the Easter weekend in Melbourne, where I lived while I went to university, and therefore spent almost every night catching up with friends. And it was great. We laughed a lot. We ate delicious food and drank great wine and reminisced about our loose collegiate days. It was a balm for the soul. I gave the experience a solid five stars. But equally, when your social battery needs a serious recharge, there is a particular joy when you get the news that a social engagement has been cancelled. You mean I get to spend an unexpected evening binge-watching some nonsense on Netflix while picking the good bits out of a takeaway pad thai? Yes, please. By the way, it has occurred to me that this notion of cancelling plans seems like a modern invention, and like most things, I blame the mobile phone. Back in the prehistoric era of my youth, if you made plans, you stuck to them, because it was mostly too difficult to cancel them. Inconceivably, at the beginning of the week, we could organise a get-together for the following weekend and lock in the time and venue. And everyone would turn up at the appointed time. There was no back and forth in the group chat about how that particular restaurant was inappropriate because Jasmine has recently discovered a soy sauce allergy, for example. And we turned up on time because we didn’t have any capacity to let everyone know that we were running late. If there was some sort of dire circumstance like a car accident, our only avenue was to stumble to a pay phone and call the actual restaurant to let our friends know that we weren’t going to make it. This never happened, by the way. Not once. And even if, earlier in the day, you thought you might fake an illness and not attend, you would have to actually call someone and have a conversation with them to enact this plan. There was no opportunity to send an impersonal text. You had to succumb to the possibility of cross examination and hear the actual disappointment in their voices. This was obviously way too confronting, so nobody did that. We just went. Can you imagine? I suspect a bunch of gen Zs currently require a good lie down at the mere thought of it. Which should get them out of tonight’s social commitments. You’re welcome, Gen Zs.