“Ghosting people (deleting them from their digital lives) is certainly easier than a confrontation. But the person on the receiving end of the ghosting, it’s like there is a death. They are suddenly shunned, there’s panic, they call out, they are worried… they think it’s you, they think its them. Do you have any idea the destruction that we reap on people, by ghosting them.”
Jesus that hits hard – as someone who was ghosted by people I called my friends in my first year of university, it took me years to get over the sudden loss of what I thought were deep friendships.
But it is certainly easier for people to just delete someone they don’t want to see anymore and not reply to their messages than it would be to just say:
“I don’t like you.
I don’t want to be friends anymore.
Here’s why.”
We don’t have closure in the age of social media; we see photos of people we used to care about having fun with their new friends. How do we deal with this change in our society?
I know one thing for sure, when I have children I will forbid them, for their own good, from having social media accounts or smartphones until they are emotionally mature and developed enough to understand them.