This has to be one of the most beautiful things I have ever seen.
Thank you Candy Chang.
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Well, it can.
This just struck me a few minutes ago. I was looking through the photos of a friend from whom, through a set of varying circumstances and differing changing life ideals, I have grown
distant. We hardly speak. I read posts of hers on my transient little news feed, and some of them make me downright upset in that I never would have taken this person to be so, well, narrow.
As I browsed through those photos, I remembered days when Facebook was more intimate, less open to the world. I remembered looking at them just after I became friends with this girl in real life, at a time when life itself was more simple and the people you knew and loved didn’t turn out to be different that you thought.
Maybe this post is more if a cathartic coming-of-age exercise. I mean, part of growing up is that it hurts to see people who you thought were your closest friends veer off. But in the Facebook world, it is more difficult than just recalling a fond memory of someone with whom you no longer speak. You are constantly updated on their lives: you see their fleeting thoughts and the snapshots of their life, profound or mundane, without feeling like you are able to talk to them anymore about their current happenings. And that can be unbearable.
We are all so damn connected, especially even with the people that in the natural process of social evolution would fall out of touch with us. And that can be an obnoxious, pathetic one-way ticket down Melancholy Freeway, which is what Melancholy Lane was before social networking got ahold of it.
Ben Folds says, “Everybody knows it hurts to grow up.” And he didn’t know shit about Facebook then.
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