My name is Paul. I live in the northeast area of the country. For several years I thought at some point I would take the time to tell my story, the story of my past, where I went, what I did and what happened to me along the way. A few years back I looked around a little as I thought of how to connect with others, learn of their experiences and share mine too. It was about that time I was introduced to Facebook so I opened an account and off I went. For the first few months I really did enjoy reconnecting with people I went to school with, worked with and even grew up with but what I soon discovered was that I found them on FB but the re-connection part never happened. Well, time went on I exchanged some photos, jokes and web links with friends and family but the connection part just didn’t come to be. Now, I could spend a lot of time sharing my thoughts about FB but that has all been said before and the privacy settings…blah blah blah but nobody forced me to use FB and it is what it is. Having said that, there is one aspect of Facebook and social media as a whole that our society will be coping with like nothing before in our history. Social media has allowed us to build a very large list of friends, coworkers, neighbors, acquaintances and even a ton of people we don’t even know and we brought them together as a group in our profile for lack of a better term. When you add in the thousands of friends of friends that we now have some electronic link to, we now have instant lines of communication with thousands of others, 24/7, 365 days a year.
When my grandparents got older they became aware of someone’s passing by finding the obituary in the newspaper or just from hearing about it through the grapevine. In other cases they may have learned of a close friend or neighbor that had died and this unfortunately was all part of getting older and happened at a rate that most of us had become accustomed to coping with. What I mean is, I believe we all have a capacity, a limit to which how much we can grieve. What I mean is, if a person dies, you grieve a certain amount and when a few people die maybe you grieve more deeply…it hurts more sometimes. I think what our parents and grandparents had in what I call the “grieving capacity” may be somewhat different than what this and future generations may endure…it may be vastly different and here’s why. Think about it, as we all begin to get older, we will be experiencing or become aware of the deaths of first only a few friends maybe at first but then as we and everyone else ages, we will slowly become aware of more and more people passing…more than usual, then dozens more and as we get older, we will likely be mourning, in varying degrees of course, the passing of dozens of people a month from our huge lists of friends and friends of friends. In the past, many of these folks would’ve died quite possibly without us even knowing about it but now our capacity to grieve may be pushed like no other time in history. Many people have several thousand names in their friends list…are they prepared for what’s in store as they grow older…do people have the the “grieving capacity” of say 1,500 friends, how about 5,000? How will you feel when your friends list goes from a few hundred to about 10…are we ready for that? We have never experienced such personl loss in such a measured fashion before. For me, I think I might not like to know if 20 or 30 more of my high school classmates, 4 neighbors and 2 ex-coworkers passed away this year; it just doesn’t feel natural, at least for me to be aware of all that and at some point the numbers will become far greater. In other words in the example I used with the generations before us, they suffered the loss of or were exposed to the loss of a few people a year…of course this varies, but what might it be like if you became aware of several hundred of your friends or their friends passing over the course of a year? I think that exceeds my capacity…
I imagine this is the first time you have considered this idea and yes, it is a bit of a strange concept, but give it a couple of days, really think about this, then come back and let me know what you think and how you feel.
Then, Now & Tomorrow 