Just the way you aren't

Last night, the wife and I found ourselves with some alone time. One kid is abroad, the other, asleep and we weren’t quite ready for bed. So we googled everyone we knew in college, looked for them on Facebook, and judged their lives. Spoiler alert – we’re still the awesomest.

We discovered a few interesting things – first, many of our school mates are not on Facebook, or have not put any real detail on Facebook. I find this distressing. People have the responsibility to put their lives out there so that I can find them and know what they are up to without having to have any real or meaningful interaction during which I feign interest.

Next, people have chosen life paths which don’t all fall in line with what I think they were slated to become and do. The choices to have children or not, where people settled, and their careers often diverged from my personal expectations. This is unacceptable. Another thing: some of you really made quite a life for yourselves. It is admirable to see some of you rise to such heights. Why you have not dragged me up is beyond me, but you still have that opportunity.

Facebook, various alumni resources and web searches, plus a little deductive reasoning make it much easier to track down names from the past and catch up without having to catch up. They also make it much easier to obsess, stalk, judge and feel depressed, all from the privacy of my home.

So, in sum, I feel pretty good about my life and am proud of some of you. Others, I am still waiting for you to blossom and become what I have decided you are meant to be. And for those of you who aren’t putting all your details out there for my perusal, jump to it. I would prefer to decide I know your life based on snippets of information which you have selected in order to force people to think what you want them to think, rather than do so based on no facts. I mean, I’m more than willing to create a complete fiction and judge you based on it, but having just enough info to come to the most damning conclusions would be most helpful.