[ahoyhere]

Self-centered, to me, means not thinking of others, because you're preoccupied with yourself. So, it makes sense to me.

Also, I didn't say "The OP has the social skills of a cockroach." Here I was addressing the audience -- the readers of my comment -- who clearly weren't taking away the same thing from the essay that I was.

For all I know, the OP deliberately avoided the topic, which means his social skills are fine, he's just a bad friend (as he indicates a reader of his blog post will think anyway). Being a bad friend in this way doesn't make you a bad person. You don't HAVE to act like a friend to somebody -- simply don't claim friendship. There, you're absolved.

(If the post was "A guy I was once friends with and then never really cared about after that, died and I didn't know", nobody would have really cared to read it.)

But it does make it seem kinda iffy to write a blog post about it, even include screenshots of the conversation, and not (apparently?) be socially aware enough to realize that the deceased man was nearly begging his friend to express some interest and concern. And so many of the commenters, from my perspective, were not picking up on anything the OP did not explicitly lay out in the essay itself, which is to say: his friend was telegraphing his problems in every possible way, and the OP ignored it. People seem to be reading it and thinking, "Oh, just one of those things." But it's only one of those things if you don't think of, or care for, others.

"assigning blame via the butterfly effect" <-- I didn't understand this. If you mean I'm waving my hands and implying it was the OP's fault the guy was sick and died, no, that's not what I meant. His fault lay in not paying attention to his friend, and then acting surprised.