Real Friends

This post is about friends.  Not Facebook friends, or FourSquare friends or Twitter followers, but you know…real life, “I love you and will bail you out of jail” friends.

The type of friends that the loneliest people crave, and the luckiest people have.

When you’re young, making friends is easy.  You both like something similar, like the color blue,  and voila  instant bffs.    Some people keep those friends for life, but most go through stages in their life and even the greatest of friends, come and go.

As you get older, making friends is harder because people have lives and work and its just hard to fit someone new into your life.

I’m not really someone who lets people in easily.  I’m friendly with a lot of people, but usually don’t let them in completely for one main reason… they usually disappoint.

And though I’ve gone through my fair share of friends in life, I feel like we lose track of who real friends are these days.

I’m not going to sit here and blame the ‘internet’ as most people are probably expecting me to do at this point, but why would I?

The internet actually brings people closer and makes the world smaller.  No matter where you are in the world you can have an im conversation with someone and it feels like you’re right there with them.

You meet someone you have a connection with and can email them the next day, or you can tweet @ them, or become facebook friends.

I think its amazing.  I’ve always thought that, and I’ve become really good friends with people via im that I only met a few times in my life.  I’ve become good friends with people via im that I don’t get a chance to see as often in person, but we talk daily.  I’ve also kept friends close when they move to other cities due to im.

My issue though,  are the people that don’t make those real life connections.  They don’t really have or know how to keep real life friends.

The internet makes it very easy to be a loner.  Some are usually incapable of making real life friends but work very hard at increasing their twitter following so they can stay up till all hours of the night engaging with perfect strangers.

They sign onto ChatRoulette hoping to make a connection and not see too many naked guys.  They are willing to deal with the naked guys JUST for the possibility at making a connection.

Though, at the end of the day, no matter how many facebook friends you have, or how many followers on twitter you have, do you have someone to bail you out of jail if you needed it?

I think the internet has made it easy for people to get closer, but its also made people distant.   People who have thousands of facebook friends or twitter followers, have many people to share things and experiences with, but I feel like they lose out on real friendships.

If I died tomorrow, would I care how many twitter followers I had?  Would they show up to my funeral and even have anything substantial to say about you besides “ I know she likes Jamba Juice and Redbull and has a website”.

Its very easy to hide behind your tweetdeck and your facebook profile and not feel lonely b/c you’re interacting with people, but where are those people when you’re having a bad day?  I wonder why people don’t know how to be a good friend, and then I realize that in our life that friendship is hard to define.

There are many posts online explain how to engage your facebook fans, or how to get more twitter followers, and usually those are for business purposes;  I actually started to make a list on how to  keep your real  friends.  But I realized it comes down to one thing.

“Don’t Suck.”

Making genuine friendships is not easy, but I’ve realized that no matter how many facebook friends or twitter followers someone has, they are usually open for new REAL true friends.  Its much more fun watching that March Madness game with a friend at the bar than tweeting about it with everyone else watching alone.

I fear that people are just going to be hermits that can only talk to each other via machines and not know how to really interact.

Its become easy to not respond to emails or @ replies with your casual friends, but people seem to think its ok to not reply to their real friends b/c they don’t have to reply to everyone on their twitter feed.   But the truth is, real friends, actually get offended by that, and soon enough, they wont care to be your real friend anymore.

So don’t suck, because like everything in life, things and people come and go.  Tomorrow there will be a new technology people are jumping on and maybe you won’t be as fun on it and will have less followers or “friends”.    Will that drastically change your life?   These technologies are supposed to make the world smaller and make the world you live in better, they aren’t meant to be your only world.

If you don’t know who your true friends are, or the people that are trying to be friends with you sincerely, you’re going to live a very lonely life.

When you’re in jail, you only get one phone call.  They don’t let you power up and tweet something out.   You get one person.

If you don’t know who you would call, or aren’t sure if they would be there in 15 min with a check no matter where they had to get the cash from…I would reassess your real life friendships.

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