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armchair philosophy
Mar. 12th, 2009 01:11 pmDuring a discussion at work today, a few co-workers and managers were talking about how they use Facebook to stay in touch with professional colleagues who move on to other locations, people they meet and have a personal connection with in the course of their business relationships, etc. One jokingly mentioned that Facebook has the drawback of making it easy for his old girlfriends from 20 years ago to find him. Another said she gets "add friend" requests all the time from people she went to high school with.
"I want to ask them," she said, "they didn't want anything to do with me in high school; why would they want anything to do with me now?"
It occurs to me maybe this is why I don't use Facebook - not because of old boyfriends or people who weren't my friend in high school (though oddly I have run into this phenomenon - it's been almost 20 years since I graduated, and over the years I've had a few people contact me who barely acknowledged my existence when I really NEEDED friends as a teenager ... and I have no idea why, especially since I have plenty of friends I've made since then who aren't going to desert me because of popular opinion somewhere else), but because I don't live too far in the past. This definitely originated in high school with fair-weather "friends," but I think it owes a lot to those years between the ages of 28 and 35 when I couldn't get hired anywhere despite a resume (c.v.) that just 10 years before would've opened a LOT of doors for me.
I learned to make do. I learned to survive doing other things. Most of all, I learned that nobody cares about anything but your very immediate past - the "what have you done for me lately?" mindset. You can work at improving and climbing for years, but all it takes is a single incident or short string of bad luck to unravel or override all of that. This is why I don't work as assiduously as I should on my resume, or spend years cultivating professional contacts for career like I used to - ultimately, those people didn't do anything for me. It was the people I found AFTER I fell on hard times and proved myself to, who were able to gain me entry elsewhere and help me get ahead.
Cynical? I don't think so. Cynical is when you presuppose - experience is when you're able to infer from experience.
"I want to ask them," she said, "they didn't want anything to do with me in high school; why would they want anything to do with me now?"
It occurs to me maybe this is why I don't use Facebook - not because of old boyfriends or people who weren't my friend in high school (though oddly I have run into this phenomenon - it's been almost 20 years since I graduated, and over the years I've had a few people contact me who barely acknowledged my existence when I really NEEDED friends as a teenager ... and I have no idea why, especially since I have plenty of friends I've made since then who aren't going to desert me because of popular opinion somewhere else), but because I don't live too far in the past. This definitely originated in high school with fair-weather "friends," but I think it owes a lot to those years between the ages of 28 and 35 when I couldn't get hired anywhere despite a resume (c.v.) that just 10 years before would've opened a LOT of doors for me.
I learned to make do. I learned to survive doing other things. Most of all, I learned that nobody cares about anything but your very immediate past - the "what have you done for me lately?" mindset. You can work at improving and climbing for years, but all it takes is a single incident or short string of bad luck to unravel or override all of that. This is why I don't work as assiduously as I should on my resume, or spend years cultivating professional contacts for career like I used to - ultimately, those people didn't do anything for me. It was the people I found AFTER I fell on hard times and proved myself to, who were able to gain me entry elsewhere and help me get ahead.
Cynical? I don't think so. Cynical is when you presuppose - experience is when you're able to infer from experience.
