VRChat Taught Me That Relationships Don’t Have Rollbacks

Software can be fixed.

If things go really wrong, there’s always git reset --hard.

Relationships don’t work that way.

It took VRChat for me to really understand that.

When Everything Was Simple

I started playing VRChat with one of my real-life friends.

Like a lot of people who discover VRChat for the first time, we spent hours exploring worlds, talking about random things, and somehow turning “I’m going to bed” into another two hours of conversation.

I’m pretty sure that’s just how VRChat works.

Back then, I assumed that was simply our routine.

Communities Grow

One of the best things about VRChat is that you constantly meet new people.

My friend did exactly that.

He made new friends, joined new groups, and gradually built his own community.

Honestly, I was happy for him.

Watching someone enjoy themselves is a good thing.

The only downside was that my place in his schedule naturally became smaller.

Turns out humans don’t scale horizontally as well as distributed systems.

Then He Got a Boyfriend

Eventually, he started dating someone.

I was genuinely happy for him.

At the same time…

I realized I missed hanging out with him.

Not because he did anything wrong.

Not because I was jealous.

Life had simply changed.

His priorities changed.

And that’s exactly what should happen.

Debugging My Feelings

I spent some time wondering why this bothered me more than I expected.

I’m studying engineering, so I’m surrounded by interesting people.

Some of them are incredibly smart.

Some are wonderfully weird.

But people you can spend hours with while your brain sits comfortably at 0% CPU usage?

Those are surprisingly rare.

I think I underestimated how much I valued that kind of friendship until it wasn’t part of my daily life anymore.

Relationships Are Stateful

As developers, we like deterministic systems.

Same input.

Same output.

Humans aren’t like that.

People change.

Schedules change.

Communities grow.

Relationships evolve.

There isn’t a rollback button.

There isn’t even documentation.

No One Is the Bug

This story doesn’t have a villain.

Nothing broke.

No one made a mistake.

A friend met new people, found someone important to him, and moved into a different stage of life.

That’s something worth celebrating.

It just took me a little while to realize that it’s okay to feel happy for someone else while also feeling a little sad yourself.

Those feelings aren’t mutually exclusive.

Final Thoughts

You can refactor code.

You can redesign systems.

You can even recover from deleting the wrong branch if you’re lucky enough.

Time is different.

The version of yesterday’s friendships only exists in memory.

Maybe that’s why it’s worth appreciating the people you get to spend time with today.

Also, writing this post didn’t magically create more friends.

Unfortunately, that’s not an open-source problem.

Thanks for playing with me, my friends.

I love VRChat.