Ranting Wombat: “Nice to See You Again…Now Piss Off!” - Editorial

Why are people so obsessed with hanging onto their past?

For those of you tuning in a little late, I am of course referring to my complete hatred of “social networking” sites such as Facebook, Myspace, etc; specifically, the fact that the most common justification I hear for obsession with these services is, “It lets me talk to people from school/work/club/the Crimean War that I’d lost touch with for years!”

There’s a very good reason that you lost touch with all those old school friends people; you weren’t bothered enough to maintain the relationship!

And why should you have been? Most of the people that I considered ‘friends’ at school really weren’t; they were just unwitting allies in the fight to make the whole education experience not suck massively, and this naturally brings everyone closer together.  Hell, there are blokes who I spent lunch with everyday for years whom I can’t even picture, that’s how much I miss having them as friends.

It’s not a bad thing either.  As life goes on, you evolve and often grow in different directions to the people you were once inseparable from; the fact that most school or work colleagues are friends due to the simple need to coexist in the same space means that these friendships aren’t designed to last beyond a couple of years anyway; an amicable parting of the ways and promises to “call soon” are the norm here.

When you start looking up all your old buddies on Facebook though, you’re suddenly obliged to actually talk to them again.  This is all well and good at first I suppose, but when the warm and fuzzies wear off you pretty much realise that that sense of nostalgia was all you had in common in the first place.

Lives change, people change, and there’s a reason friendships end.  You might luck into rekindling the kind of awesome, ‘bestest-friends-for-everest’ relationship that comes along only a couple of times in a lifetime and that lasts forever; but mostly it will just be awkward silences and pictures showing how much weight you’ve both gained, and whether either of you popped out an equally portly kid.

Why not make new relationships instead of trying to resurrect dead ones; there’s usually a reason why you lost touch with your best friend from kindergarten, and talking to them again 20 years later will probably make why this happened pretty damn clear.

Leave the past where it belongs; buried and unmourned.

…

Not that I’m bitter or anything.

        

- The Evil Wombat