FACEBOOK OVER AND OUT

I deactivated my FB account today and I feel so much better. I realized that this tool has only created a ugly dependency for communication through FB. I have very few "friends" in the real world but I do have an address book filled with emails of lots of people who contact me (rarely) for some very specific reason. Those people aren't friends and wouldn't be interested in developing or maintaining a friendship. They are just people I know professionally. If they want something, I hear from them. They know where I am on the internet thing-a-ma-bob. I'm very easy to find. They are sometimes relatives who may want to do a brief email just to see if I am alive, but they would never call. What would they say? We are too far apart to socialize and were never close enough to organise any regular visits. So, they "friend" you on Facebook and you end up communicating indirectly through some kind of community newsletter filled with junk news from other people's friends you don't know. Distance is distance. People choose being alone or actually connecting with a particular individual or group of people for a very important reason. Time. It runs out and you can't buy it back.

I have my immediate family (3 sons) and less than five friends who would know pretty quickly by my non-response that I was gone and unavailable for conversation.

Recently, I tried to contact a former neighbor in NYC and found out he had disappeared. This was a guy I never felt the need to keep in touch with for over twenty years. We were situational friends. He was the guy in the apartment across the hall and we would sometimes socialize, but after I moved out we rarely had any reason to speak and we both chose to move on. I was walking by the old building and I saw that his name was still on the mailbox inside the doorway. I looked up his phone number and called to see if he wanted to grab a coffee and catch up.

We were neighbors for over 4 years so there would be something to talk about, even if it was just how badly we had aged. The phone was disconnected. As I was turning to leave another resident exited the building so I decided to ask if he knew my old neighbor. I explained that I used to live there over twenty years ago. He looked at me funny like I might be a bill collector or process server. He decided after a moment I was OK and then blurted out: "I think he's dead! Oh, yeah, it's weird, nobody has seen him for over six months and the landlord moved all his stuff out and rented the place to somebody else. I was looking for him months ago to see if he wanted to grab a beer. I asked a few friends and nobody knows anything except he was not well for a long while and now he's gone. Just gone. I'm pretty sure he'd dead though, cause nobody just walks away from an apartment full of stuff. Not after living there for over 20 years."

For some reason this information hit me hard. And then I started thinking about all the "friends" who had disconnected from me (some actually just stopped taking my calls) and all the people I have ignored and been too busy to stay in touch with. All the people who might still be my "friends" if simply knowing of my existence were the only criteria. Not really knowing me but just knowing some small bit of information. Some Facebook info.

It got me to thinking of a possible epitaph or a gravestone.

"Here he lies, all alone. No Family, No Friends, No Facebook."

If you want to claim friendship make an effort to personally see someone, email or call. All the other stuff is just nonsense.