On quite a few numbers of occasions I have thought about deleting my Facebook account.

I have never been a simple person and I have come to believe that none of us are. We are complex through and through and certain deep human needs join us together as a species. Among these needs is the need for intimacy, i.e. the feeling of being in a close, personal, and empathetic relationship with others. Especially with regard to our wives, husbands, children, friends, and lovers… we long for intimacy.

And if we are able, we cultivate intimacy with these others, while excluding a vast host of important other others we’ve met on our path.

We had walked together with the other others a while until the road forked; we then watched them walk a while until they were gone, out of our lives forever.

Oh we might have, in the days gone by, run into one of these other others by chance, had a cup of coffee together and talked about the good times…

…then came along social networking.

For the past 1 year every person I can think of fondly from my high school years has reentered my consciousness via Facebook. Peering into their lives, seeing their children, interests, political affiliations, religious views, status posts, favorite books, has caused me to discover another human emotion that I cannot put a name to. I sometimes spend an hour or two looking at pictures I have seen before, reading old status comments—simply mesmerized by the sight of old friends who have been suddenly and radically brought out of my memory and into my present reality.

But it’s not just the persons are brought out of memory and into present reality, it’s more than that. My personal memories, part recollection and part fantasies, about these other others are also obliterated out of existence. Then I am left with what I am not so sure I really wanted: reality.

How monstrous that our minds, our very hearts and souls should be intruded upon thus; that the young and tender memories that we kept are cruelly altered, sometimes beyond repair, while we sit physically passive and emotionally activated in front of our computer monitors!

Perhaps tomorrow I will delete my profile.

*surfs over to check out the pics of his most recent FB friend*

“Viewed from an existential standpoint, questions of choice, freedom and responsibility cannot be isolated or contained within some separate being (such as ’self’ or ‘other’). In the inescapable interrelationship that exists between ‘a being’ and ‘the world’, each impacts upon and implicates the other, each is defined through the other and, indeed, each ‘is’ through the existence of the other. Viewed in this way, no choice can be mine or yours alone, no experienced impact of choice can be separated in terms of ‘my responsibility’ versus ‘your responsibility’, no sense of personal freedom can truly avoid its interpersonal dimensions.”
~ Ernesto Spinelli, 2001, The Mirror and the Hammer: Challenges to Therapeutic Orthodoxy, p. 16