When Facebook Friends are such good friends… they don’t know you’re dead

Whilst not being what the world might consider ‘old’, I am old enough to remember when Facebook was new. My personal tirade against Facebook has existed almost concurrently with my having had an account but trying to be the only person at my university without one proved inconceivably difficult and impractical a decade ago.

University days are, however, long behind me now, and it is with unbreakable resolve that, as a result of the following incident, I am no longer a subscriber to that particular social media channel and refuse to engage in any conversations to re-join it. This is my story of a dearly departed friend, who currently still has a Facebook account.

As a long-suffering insomniac, I’ll admit that Facebook and Instagram and Twitter did give me something to do in the long, lonely nights of feeling like the only awake person in the universe. Who doesn’t love a Pinterest-worthy Hawaiian beach wedding, after all, or a reality-TV-like indulgence into what-has-Donald-Trump-Tweeted-now, at three o clock in the morning on a dreary February Wednesday? It’s easy to feel the pull of any of them. But, truly, Facebook was the one - the darkest of places, the deepest of rabbit holes containing a veritable wonderland of old school bullies and married ex-boyfriends, to fulfil the desperate curiosity of Where Are They Now.

It was this exact sort of dreary February Wednesday pre-dawn behaviour when lying awake, flicking from account to account as one does and being nosy about my old school chums, that I ended up on the account of a particularly beloved and highly unique person I knew some time ago who has since passed away - ten years ago now. He was a friend from school, a boy who lived on my road, his mother knew my mother. All very normal, friendly things. We took Music together in high school and had nice chats if we ever passed in the street.

His death was sudden and spectacularly unexpected. He died aged twenty-three in the middle of the night, probably around the sort of time that I was lying awake in a different room in a different bed somewhere, wondering why I couldn’t sleep. As such, one of the last posts on Facebook he ever made of his own was to complain about the train delays making him late for work. He hadn’t long got that job in the city, after a couple of post-university years in a supermarket channelling all his energy into his band. He wasn’t at work the following morning, and never would be again.

His Facebook page brought me considerable, but bittersweet, joy – at first. I noticed how his old band mates still shared things on his wall about the band and their success. They told him how it’s all for him, and how much they wished he were here to be a part of that success with them. Others wish him a ‘Merry Christmas up there in the sky’ or just post messages when they’re feeling down and missing him, just to feel that little bit closer to him. It was tragic and upsetting, but deeply moving. Scrolling further and further back, there are messages of terrible grief after the funeral, on the day of the funeral, asking what the funeral arrangements were going to be, messages of shock and heartache addressed to hi on the day we all found out that he’d died. At the point when I can’t bring myself to go back anymore, his last post written himself on the last day he was alive, complaining about trains.

Thanks to Facebook – his mother later told my mother – she didn’t even have the opportunity to tell some members of her own extended family before they found out about his death on Facebook, from the very posts I was seeing there that brought me both smiles and sobs. She went to take him a cup of tea in the morning to get him up for work, and knew instantly that he was dead. She said that she did not scream. But that was all she had said. He had been her and her husband’s only child; they promptly sold their house and moved two hundred miles away after his funeral.

Skipping back to the present, in amongst these posts from the band and his college friends, there were birthday wishes too, and this was when I started to get concerned. Lots of them were like this: “Happy birthday up there mate, missing you.” ‘/ “Happy birthday, still a special day for us here. Love always.” Etc and so on. I loved reading them.

But I also saw this:

“Happy birthday! Have a good day.”

“Happy birthday lad! Have a good one.”

-and like a bomb that kept exploding, I realised gradually and with despair – those ones are very different to all the others. There’s no grief in there. There’s no sadness. They’re wishing him a genuinely happy birthday, because they don’t know he’s dead.

At the time, I had what one might call an averagely populated Facebook account of my own. About 350 former school friends, university friends, old colleagues, people I’d met whilst travelling and at West Ham. Lots of baby photos that I liked to look at and the occasional exceptionally right-wing extended relative that I wished fervently to block, but of course, in 2018 when this event occurred, blocking someone on social media was considered an abominable thing to do in civilised society – more so than their crimes against common sense on social media in the first place. If it wasn’t for that particular paralysing social convention, there would’ve been considerably less.

In any case, whilst I wasn’t Bestest-Friends-Forever with everyone on my Facebook account, I knew them all In Real Life and saw them, or spoke to them, fairly regularly. It was a matter of personal criteria for me holding such a thing. But I’d know for sure if they were dead. I’d know for sure if they had been dead for six entire years.

At the height of my journalism career, I was Tweeting anything up to ten or twelve times a day and was beholden to an astonishing number of followers for Little Old Me. When I had a mental breakdown and my career went down the drain, I stopped Tweeting with the fervour as was usual and went very quiet. I lost hundreds of followers overnight – and I didn’t care at all. Then I received a private message to my Twitter account a few days later asking if I was, in fact, dead.

If I had been dead, I don’t know what response they might have been expecting from me. In the case of Facebook, over the course of a decade I have seen the spectacularly ill-advised airing of all the dirty washing one could possibly envision. Imagine, then, sharing your age, date of birth, photos of your children in various states of undress, their dates of birth, your place of employment, probably accidentally your address on a few occasions, and it’s pretty easy to deduce your mother’s maiden name when her own father is on Facebook too, with his full name and all his military medals in his profile picture – with so many hundreds of people that buried within the crowd is someone who was such a level of stranger, and you paid so little attention to, that you don’t even know if they’re alive or not.

In these last two years in which there has been such a War On Data that it’s impossible now to open a tin of beans without it screaming its privacy policy at you, I’m genuinely surprised that more care isn’t taken with what is shared online. Facebook isn’t a Safe Space. No one, and I mean no one, needs to see photos of someone else’s children in the throes of potty training. All it takes is viewing a few episodes of season one of You on Netflix to make you want to change your name, get a fake passport and take a hammer to all the old technology you ever logged into throughout your entire life – because it really, really is as easy as he makes it look, if you let him.

It made me sad to think that we’re just churning out digital Happy Birthdays because Facebook tells us to – do people even look at who’s name it is, or just copy and paste ‘Happy birthday!’ and a bundle of cake and party hat emojis into all the boxes for everyone whose birthday it is that day, and gets on with their lives without a moment’s further thought? If the internet crashed overnight and never turned back on, would you ever remember a friend’s birthday ever again? As communication gets quicker, easier and simpler, it’s getting increasingly meaningless and detached. The advert on the television at the moment that describes ‘the TikTok generation’ as the ‘most connected generation’ has, in my humble opinion, got it horribly, horribly wrong.

There is a Facebook policy that means a deceased person’s account will disappear after a certain number of years. I don’t know how many; I don’t want to find out, and I don’t necessarily agree with it. I suppose they’d have to eventually, for some technological reason that I would inevitably fail to understand, but I don’t like the idea that for those of us who like to drop Ad a line from time to time to tell him we miss him, we have a limited amount of time left to do that

I’m also very concerned that such invasive, 24/7 digital connectivity between people has actually completely eroded true friendship and feeling. We are kept in contact with people we should have lost touch with a long, long time ago – as Douglas Adams might say, it’s just straight-up against the natural order of things. Frankly after seeing the annual divorce statistics in which Facebook is mentioned as a contributory factor, the fact that we are certainly meant to let bygones be bygones and not stay loosely but demandingly connected to every ex-love we’ve ever had is a hill I’d happily die on.

Although this all makes me sound like I am a thousand years old, I feel quite strongly that a lot of today’s struggles can be traced back to the fact that there’s just too much of everything. There’s way too much choice, there’s way too many TV channels and TV shows, and there’s way too many people criss-crossing into our lives that Facebook makes us feel we have an obligation to. In an extraordinary book by Kevin Brockmeier, A Brief History of the Dead, one of the characters attempt to make a list of everyone he has ever known and met in his life. When he reaches approximately ten thousand, he starts to feel overwhelmed. To keep all those people on a Facebook account and maintain some kind of meaningful connection to them is as overpowering a concept as it is staggeringly impossible.

Now that everything is this abundant, it’s so easy to be careless, disingenuous and completely ignorant of a person’s real struggles in real life – like, for example, they’re dead.

I just hope there isn’t celestial Facebook too. God knows, I’d rather live.