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this post was submitted on 14 Jun 2026
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Da gays in category four, clap with me! π π π cha-cha-cha
First I started a family and then I promptly disappeared. I still have little to no social media presence. This really the only place I'm active online.
The "Why is nobody joining my games on X-Box?" answer guide.
I spent some time dabbling in all four categories during my thirties. Never really excelling in any of them.
Fifth category: Everybody has forgotten about YOU, and you essentially no longer exist.
40s is the same, but one of them is dead
I was going to say: There's no space for dead, moved to Austin in the 10s, or crippling pain killer addiction.
All sub sections of category 4
There's also the "still acting like they're 16 years old" and they're as bad if not worse than all the other cathegories
Bottom right
I'm number four. I mean, I was. Those people have probably all forgotten about me by now.
I lurk in the high school chat, saying nothing all year round except "happy birthday" or "congrats" (baby/marathon)
They didn't have any of that new-fangled stuff when i was in school.
It is a peaceful life.
you guys still got friends?
I'll be your friend.
... You got weed?
When the definition of "friend" is "person you hung out with in HS/College and then only ever associated with via the computer", maybe you don't.
Box 4, in particular, is a really depressing rubric for friendship as it assumes a person vanishes the moment they stop providing new content on Social Media. I've got friends who occupy the first three quadrants simultaneously, but we still keep in touch by SMS and by actually visiting one another on a regular basis. We're 100% logged the fuck off past that.
Damn this is they way it is for most of us 20 somethingβs after collegeβ¦
You know, for about a decade, everyone was pushed to share everything they did on social media. It was a mistake. It was a mistake on the scale of cigarettes and smoking inside and in airplanes and in hospitals and in schools. No one thought it was a stupid idea, and a lot of people pushed it as the only way to get jobs and show you're a clever chimp that can internet so hard because interneting hard was the cool new thing.
Lower right is the hangover from that. Anyone I didn't find or didn't find me between 2008 and 2018 wasn't ever worth connecting with. The people that did find me were nice to hear from once, and we haven't talked ever again, despite being connected, for 10+ years.
My grandparents and their parents, etc. went their whole lives never seeing people again and not knowing what happened to them because they moved one time and they didn't know their new address. Whole movies were about that. Elvis had a song about that. The last episode of the first season of The Real World ended with everyone moving out of the apartment, and once that landline and address no longer went to those people, it was 100% possible that those people would be gone from each others' lives forever.
Y'all, we're not supposed to collect and keep 27,000 casual contacts throughout our lives. It's unnatural. Our brains are not built for it. We're made to have a few dozen up to 100-ish close connections that mean something, including family you don't pick.
Email some old friends you don't text with daily. Send anyone you truly care about an email to say hi. If they respond, then great. If not, don't worry about it. Enjoy high fidelity communications with those who mater to you.
We are not built to drink milk beyond infancy, yet we do. We are not built to cross oceans in a few hours, wake up in one time zone and fall asleep in another, yet we do. We are not built to eat ice cream on a scorching summer afternoon or preserve food for months and experience flavors from far away, yet we do.
The argument that something is "unnatural" has always struck me as incomplete, because humanity's defining trait is that we are not merely shaped by nature, we reshape our relationship with it. We build tools, cultures, institutions, and technologies that allow us to transcend many of the constraints our ancestors lived under.
That does not mean every new capability is wise or healthy. Some inventions enrich our lives; others burden us in ways we only understand decades later. But the fact that something exceeds the limits of our evolutionary past is not, by itself, an argument against it.
Human flourishing has always depended less on the number of people we can reach and more on the depth of the few relationships that truly matter. I miss having many Facebook friends (some I have never physically met) and seeing their life updates every once in a while, because now we all think Facebook is no longer cool.
Fair points, though, maybe more so in the abstract. To be fair, when I go try and fix or adjust or tweak something, I do always tell myself "we're humans, we change our environment to suit our needs."
Though I think you're excusing burnout and BS social media hustle culture when some people simply don't want to do that. If you want to post everything on IG, go for it. But people shouldn't feel shame for falling into the lower right square. It's a decision some people make consciously, and others less so. Which, for me, feels like loss. We had this nice thing where it was great to see what my friends from 20 years ago were up to. And now I can't participate in it because it harvests my data, and I would tell them the same. The infrastructure found us, friction-free. And when it turned out that pipes were to suck us dry, the gap was real, and the previous infrastructure not up to the task of casually serving up information. Now it (barely) takes work to say hello to someone and has to be meaningful again. People should be allowed to be OK with that.
Which is to say that my evolution argument is that we have, within a generation, taxed the limits of a part of us that hasn't gradually worked up to a universal higher capacity. Better weapons have extinguished genetic lines with no regard for adaptation or evolutionary traits other than what country someone was born into. Given 30 generations, we don't physically adapt to having bombs dropped on us. We aren't selecting for terminally online people to reproduce more and be more successful in the species, either. Maybe we are and I'm so far out of it that I can't tell.
Gen Z here. Burnt out of social media. Deleted every mainstream social media app. If you want the fastest way to never ever hear from me, it would be email. That shits incredibly overwhelming. I check my physical mailbox more than I check my email. The goal is to get away from the computer.
Based perspective on this, thank you. :)
I beg to differ.
I'm absorbed mostly in work but also a little bit of 3, however the "something" is merely trying to stave off a heart attack and premature physical degradation in general, and not so much some grand lofty fitness goal.
And also 4. The amount of negativity that entered my brain through social media reached critical mass during the early stages of Covid and I axed pretty much all of it and never returned.
#4
Option E: "Walking around in the woods"
It's kinda like washing reality off with the reality you can't have.
Have a few who check 3 of those boxes
Shit I am all of them.
Is there a 5th option for "life is already over"?
Here I am going strong in the bottom right!
I'm loving how many bottoms there are in this thread
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