As I mentioned before, I once decided to weed out my facebook friends list. I decided the other day that it was that time again.
It's almost hard to believe that at one point in 2007, I had 350 friends. What's funny about that is that they were almost entirely people I knew from college. I cut the list down to about 80-some, but it crept back up to 155 (today's count) mostly from adding random people I knew from my home town, but people I didn't really care to keep up with. As of a few hours ago, I now have 53 friends, including 3 family members.
I suppose I've grown more antisocial with age and having a child. Although some basic human social drive makes us want to be liked and feel important in the eyes of our peers, I can honestly say that I think I've "outgrown" this impulse almost entirely, with the exception of colleagues at work and some people I respect. Perhaps that's why I don't have even a tinge of desire to go to my class reunion. I won't go, in fact, even if I get invited -- which is somewhat nebulous, given that I have no idea who is "in charge" of sending out such invitations or how they get to be deemed the authority.
Maybe it's a consequence of being a sort of social pariah from my recent history of atheist activism. Maybe it's my unfailing sense of moral and intellectual superiority. It's got to be ego, or something like it, that drives us first to accumulate markers of social importance and then to discard them in the belief that they are like 99.99% of the other shit that constitutes daily life: absurd.
