I stopped making friends online many years ago, probably for a solid decade or so. All that changed in 2023 in ways that remind me of the web’s early days.
Unplugging
My story of online friendships during my career is a depressingly normal one – you just get older and lost in work. That’s all, nothing crazy.
It’s probably not that normal in the first place for a lot of people to make new relationships with anyone they haven’t met in real life or through work. Web nerds take this kind of thing for granted though, it seems to be such a common pathway to tinkering online in the first place.
You work on a website for fun. You meet others that do the same. And back in the 2010’s, that meant you were also on large corporate social media. Twitter was like the watercooler from work.
Until that got old as well. There wasn’t a single dramatic event that got me to leave social media with a great amount of fanfare, like you’ll occasionally see in dramatic posts from friends about how they’re taking a hiatus from social media. I’ve never made a pretentious announcement like that, as if I’m some sort of celebrity that needs to make a press release to update my fans about urgent updates to my schedule.
It’s easy pickings these days to blame it all on Twitter becoming a cesspool but the truth is that the firehose got to be too much for me years before then. My mental state in my last few years in San Francisco was one of a slow narrowing of vision, where I was battling burnout so hard that I wouldn’t look at screens in my off-hours because I could barely stand to look at it during the work hours either. My friend circle ended up being almost entirely around fellow small dog owners and non-techie regular civilians.
I just sort of let social media putter out in my life. Which meant less meetups in real life, which meant less friendships that were first created in digital spaces.
Nobody cared. I didn’t care. It was just a gradual slow ghosting of public spaces.
And it was fine. Until it wasn’t.
Movie Nerds
Similar to my unplugging over the 2010’s, getting back into making digital friends has been a slow boil as well. And the initial spark was from an unexpected source – theater geeks.
Just before the pandemic started, I’d reconnected with a theater buddy from my college years that now worked in entertainment in LA. We fought the cabin fever of the lockdowns by starting weekly Zoom parties to watch TV and movies together. We’d stay up late for premieres of shows like Wandavision, then kept going with game nights and even ended up doing a rewatch of the full MCU.
The friends-of-friends eventually became my friends too as well all got to know each other’s quirks, interests and sense of humor. I followed along with their podcasts and even made a few guest appearances, first with a Q&A interview and then in a group panel about Dune.
I’m hoping we can do another Dune show again before the next movie. I read all seven of the books in the original arc and totally loved them.
Those relationships bled over into the real world too, as we got annual passes to Disneyland (a great spot to practice photography) and went to movie premieres.