This isn’t about moving on past a difficult time in your life, though it could be. It’s not about moving past an embarrassing or traumatic episode. It’s about something much more common and relatively mundane when you think about it. It’s about making a conscious decision today that 20 or so years ago you never had to think about at all.
It’s about putting the past in the past and keeping it there. It’s about freeing yourself to focus on the things you need to focus on right now, whether it’s for work, for social, for community, or for family. It’s about being present in the present. It’s about living the life you’re living right now. Not the one you lived 10, 20, or 30 or more years ago.
What makes this tough to do is social media. Thanks to social media, your social life might feel a bit cluttered. If you’re one of those people with many hundreds or even thousands of Facebook “friends,” you could even be a bit of a social hoarder. Just like that couch-on-the-porch hoarder who has a box of paper towels somewhere underneath a stack of flea market plates, you may have so-called friends on Facebook who you barely know or haven’t talked to in years. But somehow you feel obligated to keep them in your feed.
Before the internet, if you saw a high school classmate at graduation and went your separate ways, it was a given that you’d likely never see or hear from each other unless you really made an effort. The way life is, you made new friends in college, maybe you met someone and got married, and then you had kids. You’ve had jobs and made friendships there, and you’ve built a network of people who know you as an adult or in the present iteration of yourself.
It’s now been decades since you’ve seen or even heard about that high school classmate who, until recently, was firmly in the rearview mirror of life. Then you got his friend request on social. Not much thought goes into your next move. You accepted it and moved on, right? You didn’t want to be rude, after all.
I have done the same. Actually, I have to admit, as active as I am on the X platform, I rarely post on the other platforms I use: Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn, and I almost never initiate friend requests. So my approach may be different than yours.
When it comes to connecting or reconnecting with people, I prefer the natural and organic approach. If we know each other in person and want to stay in touch, social media is great for that to a point. But I made a decision a long time ago, in the interest of time management and simplification, I’m not going to waste a second looking at your family reunion pictures. If it’s something you want to tell me about when we get together, I’m all ears. I really want to hear your stories. Until then, I’m busy.
That’s not a lie. I prefer to focus on whatever I’m doing at the moment, be it work, family, or some activity. More than likely, it’s not sitting in a chair and watching TV or monitoring Facebook. That’s why it’s been a little foreign to me when someone I’ve been connected to on Facebook or LinkedIn seemed a little perturbed when it became clear to them that I wasn’t keeping up with them on social media. I’m not talking about close friends, mind you. I’m talking about acquaintances at best.
You might wonder why someone like me even bothers to be on social media if this is my attitude. My answer is simple. I use X as a news and commentary feed. I monitor it and post to it constantly, but none of that activity is tied to my personal or social life. It’s all about the here and now.
As for Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, and other channels, given that my line of work has been in communications, I’ve always felt the need to really know every possible channel for communication so that when my clients ask for advice, I know what I’m talking about, at least in part through direct experience. I’ve always said that the day I decide to retire, one of the first things I will do is close down a lot of social media accounts.
For me, Facebook is for friends and family, mostly, so that I can see pictures from friends and relatives I have stayed in touch with and want to stay in touch with. Instagram is for my podcast. LinkedIn is for professional purposes. On these platforms, I can’t really figure out why I have all the contacts on there that I do, since I really don’t know most of them.
In recent years, I’ve received an increasing number of friend requests from people I knew in high school or my younger days. Most of them are from people from my past that I never thought that at this point would be in my “present.” Actually, most aren’t. But to be polite, I’ve accepted the friend requests.
More often than not, our relationship today consists of me seeing a post in my feed of what they ate on a cruise last night and me wondering, “Who is this person again?”
Does the fact that we once sat next to each other in algebra class mean I have to spend the rest of my life seeing this person’s vacation pictures?
One of the strangest experiences I’ve had in this new digital world, where the past can’t just be left alone, started when I created a Facebook group for a family Christmas party. I thought it would be easier to just create this group so that we could cover all the details in one place, and maybe after the event, share photos and other things.
It was very nice and added to the event, and then it sat dormant. Before long, as I am now the family’s unofficial archivist, I decided that would be a good place to digitize old photos and 8 mm film and share them in one place with the group. It was a labor of love as various family members commented with stories I’ve never heard and shared memories that I’ve long forgotten.
Cousins heard about the group, so a few of them joined, and it helped me more fully appreciate the power of a platform like Facebook.
To be sure, I’m a huge history buff, I’m the author of our own family history booklet, and I’m hugely sentimental when it comes to talking about the past with people in my life who were there. But you have to draw the line somewhere, and for me, that line is when a past you never really knew or cared about invades your current existence.
And so, as this Facebook group grew in popularity among extended family, I got a private message from a cousin I hadn’t seen in a very long time and barely know now. Apparently, she bought one of those popular DNA testing kits that puts you online so that you can explore your family ancestry.
If you really want to ask for trouble, you can sign up to be on a somewhat accessible database so that you can connect with a stranger in another part of the country or the world who 23andMe tells you shares the same ancestor as you. I’ve always felt a better name for that company would have been “TrustMe.”
My cousin told me that a German woman who lives in Texas reached out to her and told her that, based on a DNA database, they were related. The German woman had constructed a sincere but inconclusive story that made her think they were related. It was based on a single fact. The German woman’s grandfather was one of the 3 million American GIs who served in Germany during World War II. That's it. But when the German woman talked to my cousin by phone, she learned my cousin had uncles who served in the European theater during the war.
Somehow, after talking, the two of them talked themselves into concluding that our one uncle, who was killed in Germany during the war, must have been this woman’s grandfather. All of this is not only based on no concrete evidence, but the German woman didn’t even have a name or an anecdote to give the theory any legitimacy.
All the German woman really knew was that she had some commonalities in her DNA with my cousin, but as I would learn, that was not the case with my cousin’s sister or brother, who were in the same database. Go figure.
Now, my cousin wants me to admit this stranger into the family Facebook group. I had to say “no” and create a policy that the group was for family memories, not family genealogy. I suggested to my cousin that if she wanted to start a separate Facebook group on genealogy, she could do so, but count me out.
All of this just reinforces for me – in terms of my personal life – that while it’s wonderful to remember the past, preserve photos and mementos of the past, and tell stories about the past, sometimes you have to find ways to keep the past in check.
Otherwise, it can creep up on you. The time for living is now. For me, that’s just an easier and simpler way to go. Perhaps that great philosopher Ferris Bueller said it best.
