The Unsocial Animal.
Tonight, I met
with a friend for what ended up being a very comical evening.
It’s nice when you can know someone for such a long time and still find topics to discuss and things to be amused by. There aren’t many with whom this sort of relationship can continue, seemingly indefinitely, with scope for endless material. We regularly prefigure points of conversation with “I may have told you this before”, yet impressively, we still find things we haven’t brought up; having known each other for over twenty years, I can’t help but wonder when the well will run dry and we’ll have to resort to sitting in silence.
It seems as you get older your friendship group diminishes, or perhaps this is just the case with me. I have a lot of acquaintances, but there are only a tight handful who are truly close friends; some I see more than others, yet when we do meet up, very little has changed.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping your community small. We weren’t designed to function in big societies like the internet and social media force many of us to exist in today. It can feel like a competition, with many having an inbuilt desire to have the most Facebook friends or Twitter followers, despite barely recognising them if they pass them on the street. I can’t stand this - in the same way I hate it when people I know don't follow me back on Twitter or to acknowledge a tweet or a picture they’re tagged in, because they’re apparently too busy or too important to give me the time of day; I’m not here to massage somebody's ego if they’re not prepared to give me basic grace.
(Time to steer things back to the positive and step down from my soapbox.)
There were points this evening when our conversation was funny enough to bring me to tears; you can't fake that.
It’s nice when you can know someone for such a long time and still find topics to discuss and things to be amused by. There aren’t many with whom this sort of relationship can continue, seemingly indefinitely, with scope for endless material. We regularly prefigure points of conversation with “I may have told you this before”, yet impressively, we still find things we haven’t brought up; having known each other for over twenty years, I can’t help but wonder when the well will run dry and we’ll have to resort to sitting in silence.
It seems as you get older your friendship group diminishes, or perhaps this is just the case with me. I have a lot of acquaintances, but there are only a tight handful who are truly close friends; some I see more than others, yet when we do meet up, very little has changed.
I don’t think there’s anything wrong with keeping your community small. We weren’t designed to function in big societies like the internet and social media force many of us to exist in today. It can feel like a competition, with many having an inbuilt desire to have the most Facebook friends or Twitter followers, despite barely recognising them if they pass them on the street. I can’t stand this - in the same way I hate it when people I know don't follow me back on Twitter or to acknowledge a tweet or a picture they’re tagged in, because they’re apparently too busy or too important to give me the time of day; I’m not here to massage somebody's ego if they’re not prepared to give me basic grace.
(Time to steer things back to the positive and step down from my soapbox.)
There were points this evening when our conversation was funny enough to bring me to tears; you can't fake that.
