What Facebook taught me about friends and high school

With very few exceptions, I have ran across everyone I ever went to high school with on Facebook. From the first week I joined, I was inundated with friend requests from everyone you could imagine. In many cases they were even people I don’t remember getting along with at all. Of course you, probably just like them, add them hoping to turn over a new leaf and show how much you have grown since high school.

The interesting part is that we have all grown since high school, but not always in the ways we might expect. Many people I expected to stay close with for life, I was still close with without Facebook. Some people who I thought I would be friends with forever, I lost touch with way before Facebook, and instead of rekindling those friendships with this new connection, I only confirmed how trivial they were to start with.

The real interesting ones are some of the people I had little to no contact with. After high school, life swallowed us up, chewed on us awhile, spit us out, and we landed with common ground that connected personalities that we would have otherwise never found.

So what’s the moral here? I would say there isn’t much of one you can do anything with now. Take the chance to add those people you never thought you clicked with. Get involved and take an interest to see where everyone landed. Once you survey the landscape and figure out who is meaningful to you, drop the outliers. Build a clan, share your life and have fun.

The real value of Facebook to me is those interactions. I would wake up tomorrow a happy man if a virus ripped through Facebook over night and shredded all of the fan pages, the Mob Wars, faux-causes and quizzes. Those things are on a one way trip to ignore-ville for me anyway. But I still thank Facebook for helping me put some perspective on relationships that I have questioned for years, and helping me find new ones.

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