We belong to the initial generation to experience this immense distortion of established social communication. Upon graduation, we receive public messages from friends and acquaintances as everybody goes there own way, dispersing out into the world. “I wonder what ever happened to…” only applies to those rare few who choose not to engage with social networking services. If anything, the removal of this uncertainty only brings more into focus how distanced one has become from those they who they once shared the same direct path with. Perhaps my own experience and impressions which have been born from this basic scenario are atypical, but, primarily, yeah, it is all just immensely depressing.
There are people who I was pretty good friends with in high school who have moved in completely different directions than I have in so many ways… and, although an understandable and natural occurrence, it seems nearly impossible to be mature enough to not allow such things to affect me. It is likely that the same people I am thinking of sometimes happen over my own profile and are filled with their own saddening discomfort with the direction of person I have taken. This thought is what, earlier in the day, led me to consider the following:
Yes, it is discouraging that, given my own views and ideas, this young man who I was once good friends with has basically come to fill a rather stereotypically sexist, racist, conservabro role, readily offering evidence of these tendencies via shared links and status updates. The truth is that people change as they always have and will always continue to, regardless of the popular means and ease of social interaction. In certain cases, I do wish that these invariably depressing revelations could be replaced with a simple, “I wonder whatever happened to him,” but, it is my own conscious choice to engage and, therefore, this consequence is of my own bringing. Even beyond the consideration of how he must view me (though, I do not so quickly delve into discussions of political and social matters on that sort of forum), what possibilities does this shift in his character imply are possible in others? The first part of that transition is, of course, assuming that he ever thinks of me at all anymore. Anyway, what of the people who I didn’t think much of either way back in high school? Or, worse yet, what about those who I openly did not get along with? Were my tune more towards an optimistic harmony, might I find some abstract comfort in this potential, rather than focus solely on its directly experienced negative realizations?
This sense lately… this comprehension of how incredibly immature I still am, has permeated my experience and relationships on every level. I would like to think that the possibility lays within me to come to this sort of peace with any given scenario before first undergoing the self-centered and depressive knee-jerk reaction to it all. I feel now that, with some key and inexusable exceptions, anybody who I regularly clashed horns with in high school were likely just as much in the wrong/right as I was on any given issue. I am also sure that, in their eyes, I had plenty of key and inexcusable exceptions of my own. I don’t know.
Don’t worry, though, I am sure that they’re all assholes now, too.
