22 March 2020

 This is my impression, mind you, so take it with a grain of salt.

Back in the 80's, when I was a teen, I could just hop over to a neighbor's house and have some quick company. Most of my friends were school mates, within one grade level of me. Cable was just beginning to debut, and there was no streaming - closest thing to it was a video rental store.

Then come the 90's - now, my circle of friends are a mix of class mates at the university, some co-workers, maybe a student or two that I tutored. The high school friends were fading away. There were some attempts at long-distance letter writing. For me, there was also a heavy influence from my living situations: friends made on the dorm hall, or living in the co-ops. Cable TV was blossoming into hundreds of channels and I decided to watch less of it.

Next, are the 00's... Trying to live first in an apartment by myself and trying to live in sober living. Age was beginning to separate me from my classmate friends. It was super important to be doing neighborly drop-ins because I felt soooo isolated in the rest of my life. My drinking was speeding up, and then arrested. I found some solace in AA groups, usually hanging out after the meetings with the smokers. I had pretty much abandoned TV by now, but I was just beginning to use a cell phone.

By the 10's... I had stepped into Facebook, I no longer was in school and I had a string of lost jobs. I did quit smoking, but that pretty much distanced me from the majority of "AA socializing". So, technology was encroaching with so much media; and yet the real world connections felt almost minimal at best. Living in sober living for years just showed me that very few people live there for more than 6 months.

Is there a point or moral? I don't know. Maybe it just feels like I got further and further isolated by societal structures, as I grew older. Perhaps, it could have been arrested by marrying and starting my own family. Perhaps it's unique to my life path, and others don't have these growing pains.

In some ways, the isolation tactics makes this social distancing seem fairly easy. In other ways, In other regards, I just don't feel special to anyone, anymore. Perhaps that's a feeble cry for attention.... and now i'm just getting on a morose pity pot.