I detest this with a passion. It's a common refrain, and one that rejects any empathy or sympathy; strikes me as relentless, heartless, and small. Sure I can k

I detest this with a passion. It's a common refrain, and one that rejects any empathy or sympathy; strikes me as relentless, heartless, and small. Sure I can keep in touch with friends and family. Even if I walkaway from the active broadcast channels they use, I don't necessarily lose total contact with them. At least some of them. But they are chatting & sharing in conversations that I will no longer see or be a part of. My walking away has a huge loss to me, is me walking away from gathering spots and places where others habutate. Trying to disregard that loss feels like a gambit I hear a lot from people who are regressive, who want us in a pre-social-media age & think we ought to all walk away. I do not think it's anywhere near that simple, and I think there's huge value that we have entered a connected era, that we do keep in some contact with people from such a wide range of our lives. The serendipity of interacting with someone we otherwise wouldn't, across sometimes such great time and space: that's so neat. I don't want to walk away from that. I want to improve it.