Talking about friendships will absolutely reveal who we are, that’s why I am very hesitant to write about it online, since you don’t know who is reading it or what the implications are, since everything online stays forever.
But if you believe we live in a matrix, then even thought can live forever, can’t it? And if we live in a matrix, the thinking may come from a server and we are possibly just computer terminals (the ones that have no hard drives). Anyhow, if we do live in a matrix, then friendship online or offline doesn’t make any difference to anyone except to your own well-being.
We must all agree that online friendships are extremely fake and volatile. It could exist in one moment and disappear into the void the next. The two people who were ‘friends’ can ghost each other in an instant. So that’s the reason online relationships are volatile and fundamentally cannot be trusted.
But online friendships have existed from the beginning ever since there were computers. The simple ‘Hi there’ that blinks from a terminal prompt that waits for a reply can be as exhilarating as the later full-blown friendship on Facebook or anywhere with real-time video chatting. And sometimes that friendship, whether from video-game sessions or Stack Overflow discussions can even last longer than the modern day zoom-friends.
Conveniences do not guarantee friendships. On the contrary, if there are real friendships, inconveniences can make it stronger.
Do online relationships need physical contact to last longer? Not necessarily. Especially platonic friendships based on mutual admiration of talent doesn’t have to have physical contacts, as long as the foundation of the friendship is built on the internet, such as a website, a technology that they are both interested in, a hobby that they share online, or whatever.
Online friendships definitely enrich our lives compared to a hundred years ago, where the equivalent might be pen pals — people who wrote letters to each other, even between continents sometimes.
If the online friendship is developed into a physical friendship then I’d say it becomes a physical relationship from then on. Because, like I said, online friendships can disappear in a second’s notice. You can’t even tell these days if the other side is a person or a bot. So the physical revelation is absolutely a watershed moment for the relationship. So next we will talk about the physical — real life friendships.
If we are lucky, we may be blessed with friends. You may have tons of friends, you may have just a handful, it doesn’t matter. We can only pray to God to bless us with friends. Of course friendships are like everything else in life, we can’t take them for granted, we have to cultivate them, reflect upon them, and pray for real friendships. And cultivation involves trimming, by which I mean staying away from toxic people. But it is, of course, an art. How do you deal with art? You deal with art with luck, muse, patience, dedication, decision, and many other virtues. So in this friendship topic we have a lifetime to read about it, to learn, and to grow. We may never finish learning about friendships until the end, when our time in the matrix is up.
