The price of friends

I suspect that the normal reason why youngsters resort to socializing on myspace and facebook is that they find it easier, anonymous, unaccountable, and less threatening. I think in general this is a bad trend as our society of young people grows up and doesn't know how to have real face-to-face interpersonal relationships.

In my own life I am strongly repelled by the idea of socializing on these "social networking sites" for the reasons above and also because it just feels like a silly waste of time. The energy experienced when socializing in person is just plain missing.

So I have found myself wondering then why I am spending an increasing amount of time on sites facebook. I can't say I really enjoy it, yet I am there more often lately. The reason is that most of my friends have moved or are moving out of Tahoe. Drew and Pete and Dom are really the only remaining core friends here, among several others who are also friends, but many many have left. Pete is moving in 2 weeks as well. So Facebook while lame in my opinion is better than nothing. A friend of mine who just moved to a new place and is also lonely said that he occasionally goes to a local bar and just sits there alone to hear people talking to feel like he is in a social environment. I'm about there too. I do very much appreciate my current Tahoe friends...they are awesome, truly. The problem is that the trend is toward them leaving.

Leila is in the same place. She was feeling the hurt of having all our friends move. We talked about moving ourselves, but because of various reasons it would set us back about $25-30 k / year in income, which we could handle, but would knock us from being able to plan and build for the future to being simply living paycheck to paycheck. So if I won the lottery at this point I would say we would move. Of course my parents live here which is another major reason we want to stay. But the fact is that our friendships are dissapearing and our son won't have any peers at this rate. What is the price of friends....$25k / year? I don't know, someone send me a link to the friend value calculator please....that has to be online somewhere, right?

So theres the pain and the dilema. Live in a dying town or move and try to figure something else out. Someone today told me that we would also have trouble making friends in other towns and that the grass isn't always greener. True, but the fact is that Tahoe is a dying town right now, with very little incentive and reason for young families (like us) to move here or survive here. So, yes, difficult to plug in anywhere, but the odds are very stacked here, against us.

I've blogged about this topic before...I just looked back and saw a post on this. I hope this doesn't become a regular topic of droning complaints...I hope God either intervenes with provision or we figure out our own solution. It is interesting that blogs really do crystalize the history of one's life...as in, I can look back in 20 years and this data will probably still be here, hosted by Blogger, owned by Google, unless I take it down. So, in 20 years, hopefully I'll have some new friends!!!