"Look at the crowd and tell me whether / All are surrounded / But none are together / If you're awake, look all around / At all of the people / Still you're so alone / So alone"
I think the superficiality of such tools is becoming more and more apparent. It has become so effortless participate in the social game (for a lack of a better word) such as wishing an happy birthday or some words of support for grieving folks that it's getting hard to gauge whether people do actually care about you. It's about the work you put in.
Personal anecdote: Had to hire a guy with a van on a public holiday as I was moving to a different part of the city (Dublin). Asked my fellow French friends for help and sure enough we were loading the van at 11 am. The driver admitted that he wouldn't have had as much help if he had asked his own -Irish- friends because they'd be too hangover to bother.
I found that quite sad, especially given that all my friends are not lifelong friends, we've know each other for 5 years or less.
>he wouldn't have had as much help if he had asked his own -Irish- friends because they'd be too hangover to bother.
6pm might work with irish folks, though.
I mean, I love my friends but moving their furniture at, say, 9am on Saturday is just... not gonna work.
We probably got started with the van later than 11 actually, they were around from 11 to help get stuff out of the flat. But my point still stands.
The part I don't have time to write here is why I think that's true, but I'll say in a too-brief summary: the same tools that allow us to organize ourselves en masse into nations and industries, also necessarily create divisions and isolation that just didn't exist in most of human pre-history, which involved close-knit family and tribal units existing and interacting together and doing meaningful work together throughout their entire lives.
Memory imparts a rosy hue: you can't ask people now about the past and expect an un-biassed answer.