I think I’ve written about this before but I’m too lazy to go through 23 years of blog entries to see if I have actually put these thoughts to paper, so to speak.
I recently had a birthday reminder pop up in Facebook and the face associated with the reminder was unfamiliar. I then realized it was a co-worker from a job I had 14 years ago. We haven’t spoken or interacted in any way, including on Facebook, since I left that company back in 2015.
I have no idea why we are maintaining a connection on Facebook. So I removed them from my friends list.
Social media, and in particular Facebook, allows us to make electronic connections easily, sometimes judiciously, and often frivolously. Here’s ago I was at a going away party of a friend in Chicago and I met one of their friends, who promptly friended me on Facebook. He seems nice enough. Our paths are most likely never going to cross again. I have no idea why we are friends on Facebook, as we don’t have common interests. He had some laughs, good conversation, and a couple of beers during this one event and then we moved on. In the pre-social media days, this would have been a fond memory and nothing more, but now there’s this electronic connection and I felt a couple of pangs of guilt as my mouse pointer hovered over the “unfriend” link. I don’t want to tarnish a happy memory that I can vividly remember, and admittedly, they may or may not remember, by severing a connection that wouldn’t have lingered had it not been for Facebook.
As we navigate our way through this chaos through life, there are folks that are meant to be in our lives for a long time and folks that are meant to be in our lives for just a moment. I truly believe this is how we are wired and this is how this whole existence thing is suppose to work. We have memories of folks that we have crossed paths with, albeit good or bad memories, and then we move on. Building a connection through Facebook, and to a lesser extent, other social media platforms, artificially extends a connection that was probably not meant to be. I believe our minds and/or genetic makeup in general is not designed to handle all these extra connections.
Hence, just more ammo for the constantly growing ball of chaos.
I’m on another quest of sorts to clean up some of the chaos in my life, and a good chunk of this extends around technology, and in particular, extraneous connections. “Unfriending” is such a harsh term that evokes an emotion it shouldn’t have the right to evoke. But social media is engineered to tug at the emotions a lot so that you forge a dependence on the dopamine, which in turn helps build a data profile for profit purposes. Selling data is first and foremost the purpose of social media.
Don’t let your happy memories linger beyond their intended expiration date just to become a profit opportunity for a corporate conglomerate.
“We had a nice time together, it’s time to move on, have a pleasant and happy life.”
