One of the interesting things of our era is Facebook. Here is a website that allows us to friend people regardless of how close we are to them. I would venture a guess that most high school and college students have several hundred friends. I have 550, when I checked Saturday morning, and a quick look into my list of friends shows people with 600, 700, even 1000 plus friends. You can sort your friends based on which school they went to, when their birthdays are, and even how many mutual friends you have. For a statistician, like myself, it is quite fun to take a look at who your Facebook friends are. Being connected on Facebook to practically everyone you have ever met produces a strange outcome: Being friends with people who no longer play an important role in your life.

Scrolling through Facebook, we are bound to come across friends with whom we are no longer close. Twenty years ago it was possible to lose contact with someone and let that be that: Only hearing about them at class reunions or through friends. Now, it is impossible to not come into contact with some form of that person: Instagram posts, Facebook events, tweets. Those same college students I mentioned earlier are just now beginning to understand that.

As we grow up, mature our circle of friends and interests narrow and stabilize, as a consequence we leave some people behind. These can be old co-workers, exes, school friends, etc. I recently came across college graduation photos of a person I was close to in high school. I realized I had not seen her, let alone heard anything from her, in over two years. I could not tell you what her major was, what she planned to do with her life, nor any important things that had happened in her life. For all intents and purposes, calling her a friend was a loose use of the word at best. In the words of Gotye, “Now she’s just somebody that I used to know.”

As college students, who grew into the Internet Age, grow into the “Real World” we are going to have to figure how to deal with he friends we leave behind. Not all people can add to your existence and are easy to let go, to let them grow in their own unique and specific way. Other friendships are much harder to leave. It is very easy here to be so intertwined in this person that leaving them or them leaving would do more damage, cause more suffering than you are ready to handle. I am sure we have seen the drawing and quotes to this nature, but they all deal with the face-to-face consequences, not the digital. Saying goodbye is hard, but it is even harder when it is impossible to escape their digital footprint.

I do not offer a solution to this problem that we will all have to deal with at some point, but I hope to at least get you thinking about how to say goodbye.