I like to think that I don’t stalk people on Facebook. I simply check-up on them from time to time. I mean, what’s the point of Facebook anyway if you don’t use it to keep tabs on friends? Certainly not Candy Crush Saga or Farmville.
Life in the real world—at least the world after graduating high school—means falling out of touch with people you used to see on a daily basis. No one intends for this to happen. It’s called life. People move in different directions constantly, claiming new locations as their homes.
I frequently wonder why this has to happen. Why we get close with people just to forget about them five years later. Why we cannot just be comfortable with living in one setting, working at the same place and advancing our careers. Or why we cannot seem to make a better effort to maintain the friendships we have accumulated? There are so many people who come into our lives for such a short period of time. They play their part, and then exit the scene. Special guest stars in the television series that is our lives.
We have so many guest stars because it’s impossible to keep in contact with everyone we were ever friends with. That’s a full-time job in itself. And unless you’ve somehow inherited a large amount of money or married rich, no one has time to quit a job for twenty-four-hour socializing.
So, what do you do? You pick whose lives to follow. Or you get blessed and people pick you.
Those deemed more important get selected as such, and then begins your attempt to remain close with the chosen, main characters. The ones who you don’t have as much time for slowly slip from your life, becoming the people that you used to know. You know, so-and-so from the swim team freshmen year. She always used to skip a set at practice and had long brown hair. Or maybe it was blonde. Who truly remembers from so long ago?
On Facebook, there is the option to unfollow someone without completely defriending them. You can weed out your newsfeed to only see information on the people you want. This option would work if it were not for the fact that I cannot help but to check-up on him now and again. A friend who could not be there for me in real life, I decided I could not be there for him electronically. I’m not stalking him, though. I just like to make sure he is doing ok. See what he is up to. Look at every photo, every status.
Who am I kidding? Of course it’s stalking.
We are all stalkers in the end. Trying to stay updated on people’s lives we don’t belong to anymore. Glancing at photos of people we used to know, wondering who the new faces are that surround them. Feeling both sad and happy, realizing that things are not the same, but that everything will be okay because like our old friends, fresh faces surround us as well. New faces for them to stalk, and perpetuate the vicious cycle that is Facebook, and wondering what could have been.
