In Defense of Losing People

I read a sentence in an article the other day that has stuck with me. It said that if you (the reader) are under the age of 25, you don’t know what it’s like not to be able to find someone.

In general, this statement was referencing the 1995 movie, Before Sunrise, and its 2004 sequel, Before Sunset, the series of which was recently wrapped up in a third installment, Before Midnight. In the first movie (for those of who have been living under an Ethan Hawke-less rock), two strangers meet on a train, spend one fabulous, life-changing night together, talking and laughing and falling in love in an exotic city. When the sun comes up, however, they have to part ways, promising that at a later appointed time they will meet again on that same train platform, to see if their budding romance is meant to be. You have to wait till the second movie to find out what happened. It’s a bit like An Affair to Remember, but in real time.

The point the author of the article is trying to make is that before the advent and pervasive invasion of technology into every corner of our lives, situations occurred, like our star-crossed lovers, when people could be un-findable. You couldn’t just Facebook someone, or Google their name after the fact, or write down their email address. This was a time when you could lose someone – not lose them to death, necessarily, but to the voids that fill the spaces in between our communication. People could slip between the cracks. Now, however, our world, and we, have made it nearly impossible to allow ourselves to slip through the cracks. We’ve built up fiber optic retaining walls against being the-one-that-got-away. We can’t get away. We’ve plastered our profile pictures all over the Internet, and made it so anyone can find us. Now, we are completely non-slip.

Skyping across state and country lines

I’ve also been knee-deep, wading through Steinbeck’s East of Eden. For as much as I loathed the dust bowls and non-existent ending of The Grapes of Wrath, I’ve been nothing short of enchanted by his later, greater masterpiece, especially its commentaries on the nature of relationships between people.

One characters says a line that seems to speak directly to this issue of finding and losing other people. He says, “There’s nothing sadder to me than associations held together by nothing but the glue of postage stamps. If you can’t see or touch a man, it’s best to let him go.”

Written in 1952, this is clearly still within the context of a time when people-losing could and did happen. The characters in the books do just that, lose each other, both intentionally and not, and also in that kind of unintentionally that is the afterthought of an unfulfilled intentionally.

With these two quotes taken together, there emerge clear pros and cons to being perpetually findable.

We can connect. We connect to the Internet and then to each other through it, and it shows that if Jesse and Celine had met ten years later than they did, they could have swapped email addresses, and the next two movies about their happenstance meetings across the world wouldn’t have been necessary. They could have been happily ever after from the beginning.

I am someone who this kind of instant connect-ability benefits the most. I live far away from most of my friends and all of my family, and being able to Skype and send emails gives a sense of not being completely forgotten in this world that doesn’t really come any other way. The advent of these kind of technologies allow such moves across the globe to be easier to swallow.

The JET Program started in 1987, and being a participant in this program then, or even eighteen years ago, when Before Sunrise came out, would have been a much bigger commitment than it is a now – a commitment to loneliness, to isolation, to having to absorb yourself completely into your new culture because there would be no easy, cheap method of connecting you to your old one. Moving to a new country is not the same kind of decision that it used to be, and for that I am grateful and value my findable-ness for its ease and reliability.
The flip side of this is that it’s also much harder to lose the people you don’t want to find. Or whom you would rather couldn’t find you. A friend recently said that she had two levels of friends – those she is close to, which is about twenty people, and then everyone else she’s ever met. Because we keep everyone we’ve ever met plastered all over our lives, it can be like a giant vaudeville show of, Hello, Sweetheart, were you looking to forget about someone? Because you can’t. Not in this day and age. Exes, old enemies, annoying people, people we come to label as “not worth it.” The passive aggressive "Delete" button has replaced the closure encased in an actual Goodbye. And I don’t think that’s always good. It makes relationships too easy, and easy is exactly what they are not, no matter how close or far away you are.

By being so connected, we can also easily lose perspective on the fact that not everyone matters to us in the same amounts. Our cultural obsession with participation ribbons has ingrained in us a belief that all parts being unequal, everyone is still equal. Online, you are the same amount of “friend” with everyone. Re-finding someone means becoming his or her friend, we skip over the acquaintance stage, and I’m pretty sure a lot of people have no idea how to make an introduction. Sometimes, the people you meet are not worth your time and effort to re-meet.

I met this girl in Ireland. We spent a few days traveling together, not likely to meet again.

Granted…sometimes they are, but those are the people you should probably have coffee with, not just send a friend request to. My point is that people who matter to you in significant amounts should be findable to you outside of a strictly technological medium.

However, there’s also a third view. Like Steinbeck says, it can be the saddest practice to keep connections with people out of habit, not because it’s convenient or you want to or even because it’s good for you. I think we’ve become so accustomed to not deleting anyone that we reinforce bad habits, like spending time on people who aren’t relevant to our lives anymore, or whom have stopped being good for us. We don’t glue postage stamps on letters anymore, which at least took thought and a little money, but we click “like” and make comments and generally keep up, even with people who bring us down. Sometimes it is better that when we can no longer look or touch someone, we do let them go.

So that’s two potential negatives to the connectivity of technology. Two and a half if you count the first point as also something of negative, because if Jesse and Celine had provided each other with their contact information, we would have had a much less interesting story. They could have been happily ever after from the beginning, but what would that have done to their story as a whole? Even if it wouldn’t have ruined it, it would have changed the nature of the development of their love and just plain would have been less romantic. It’s a lot less sexy to say, I’ll Google you when I get home, than, Let’s meet in this same exact spot six months from now and see if we’re meant to be. Our lives are, essentially, stories, and it’s clear that one of these stories is much more compelling than the other. At the price of convenience, and because we are scared of being alone, we’ve killed the value of effort in relationships, and the romance of them.

I don’t really remember a time when it was possible to lose someone. I do remember physical address books and learning how to make real phone calls and choosing my first email address. Sometimes, the way connections are done today can seem so artless. However, at the same time, looking back with the fondness of nostalgia isn’t accurate either. Just because you could lose someone back then, doesn’t mean you should, and there’s something perhaps equally romantic about remembering and re-finding the people we meet in our daily lives out in cyber-space. It’s the give and take of how the world develops, oftentimes so quickly, and perhaps it’s chiefly our job to make sure we are giving back to people and not taking, no matter how we connect with them.