Connectivity

It is funny how easily people let themselves be isolated from even those they care about, let alone the rest of the world. Every day or so we are bombarded with messages about making the most of life, and concentrating on the people that matter to you before worrying about material things or status, yet we rarely as a society think anything of the idea that one could be busy and thus not talk to best friends, children and spouses for weeks, or longer. What do we do instead of keeping in touch with the people in our lives?

Many people keep hobbies that are fairly isolating, by habit if not by necessity. Reading, watching TV, scrapbooking, painting, and just about every other hobby people do alone can also become a shared activity with at least one person without losing anything of the pleasures of that hobby. Even the most introverted quiet person can share something of their life with friends, if only by sharing great books, since the books a friend recommends to you are always a reflection of that friend. Email makes it even easier to keep connected, since an email can be written in minutes or less and sent off as soon as it is written, and costs virtually nothing, yet few people really make an effort to write to friends they haven't heard from in a while, let alone keep regular correspondences.

Alvin Toffler, in his book FutureShock, makes an argument for friends and acquaintances being more temporary in the modern era, and does little towards discussing the necessity of this. At the time, of course, when he was writing, email didn't exist yet, but literature is full of letters from people who kept regular correspondence across oceans well before motorized travel was possible. expectation is as much a part of the dynamics of friendship as technology and circumstances, and intention trumps all three. If someone really intends to keep a friendship going, there is a much greater chance it will last, and if both parties have this intention, they are sure to remain friends for life, no matter what distances separate them. Perhaps our society is not dominated so much by technology and innovation as by laziness. The same lazy habits that lend themselves towards buying automated appliances for everything so we can sit around watching TV and getting fatter may easily be behind our ready acceptance of lost connections and bad relationships.