Toe in the Water

Facebook Reflections

Facebook Reflections

Facebook is a terrible thing if you're happy with your life as it is. The moment you open an account with FB, you're putting yourself right out there where you can be spotted by old friends, acquaintances and ex-colleagues from former workplaces. For those of us who can only take a certain amount of social interaction, the avalanche of "blasts from the past" is likely to be more than we didn't ask for.

it's not that we have changed our minds or feelings about people from long ago. In fact, it's more about wanting to keep things as they were. A lot can happen in ten years or more and we will have moved on. The likelihood is that they will have changed too. How much better it is to retain the memory of them as they were, to preserve them as young, hale and hearty. What possible good can come of two cranky old fogies pretending that nothing has changed and they're still the utter fools they were back then?

My early years on FB were spent largely in ducking friend requests from people I once knew. It took only a few experiences of that first rush of enthusiasm followed by the realisation that I had nothing to talk about with the long-lost one for me to become expert in hiding in plain view. The clear but terrible truth is that those new and virtual friends you've made because you play the same FB game or have commented on one of their posts are your real friends now. You have more in common with them and they change with you as you change with them. Those in the past stay in the past where they can be ageless, invincible and steadfast to whatever they believed in then.

I am immensely proud, however, that I have one friend from long ago that I correspond with fairly regularly. Thanks to this, I can claim to be reasonably human and not totally antisocial. But I've learned my lesson about trying to contact old friends. Don't do it, buddy - let them live forever in your memory.


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