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Socrates:
"The unexamined life is not worth living." |
About two weeks ago, I was talking to a friend about a couple we both knew. They'd been married for a few years, not too long (I can't remember how long exactly), and as far as I knew, were very happy with one another. But earlier that day, the wife, we'll call her Jen, changed her relationship status on Facebook to single. The status change had for some reason popped up on my news feed and when I saw it I had a reaction that's probably pretty common (no matter how frequently people get divorced) and not all that interesting. I thought, "Holy crap!" or some derivation of that general sentiment. After a quick peek below the post, my initial reaction was forgotten and replaced by curiosity and disbelief that some of Jen's "friends" had actually "liked" her status. So, after my friend and I finished joking about all the possible meanings and interpretations of an individual "liking" someone else's divorce--are they reveling in their pain; happy that their friend is out of an unhappy relationship; are they, by clicking "like", stating their intentions to court the new divorcee (the meaninglessness of such a vapid statement makes the mind reel and the imagination go wild)--and so we went on and joked at the simplicity with which Facebook and other social-media sites try to distill really complicated and at times morally ambiguous events and emotions into trite and therefore meaningless bites of data. It wan't long after we ceased our rants that we realized we might see the husband, we'll call him Joe, at an event later that night.
"So do we bring up the divorce?"
