The Illusion of Connection

Last week, I did something that felt both liberating and unsettling: I removed 150 people from my Facebook friends list. These weren’t enemies or acquaintances who’d wronged me. They were just people I didn’t actually know anymore—if I ever really knew them at all. When I finished, my friend count sat at 297. Still a number that would have seemed impossibly large to someone living in the pre-internet age. But here’s the thing that haunts me: of those 297 “friends,” I could count on one hand the number of people I’d actually call if something important happened.

This disconnect between digital friendship and real connection has been gnawing at me for a while now, but it took a brutal year of autistic burnout and work-induced stress to really see it clearly. In all of 2024, exactly one person—one—reached out to check if I was okay. It wasn’t until December. It was a phone call, direct and uncomfortable in the best way: “Are you okay? Some of what I’m noticing isn’t typical for you.” We talked for a long time. That conversation reminded me what I’d been missing: someone actually paying attention, not to my curated highlights, but to the texture of my daily existence.

The irony is that I’ve been on social media this whole time. I’ve been posting. If you’d been scrolling through my feed, you might have thought things were going reasonably well for me. And that’s exactly the problem.

A few years ago, I went through cancer treatment. Chemo, radiation, the whole nightmare—and I did it while working, never missing enough time for anyone to wonder where I’d gone. I wasn’t posting about the experience to a wide audience. I didn’t feel the need to perform my suffering for people who didn’t actually know me. Meanwhile, I was still sharing the occasional workout photo, a healthy meal, the kinds of things people post when they’re trying to take care of themselves. Which I was. But that’s all most people saw.

When I eventually told people what I’d been through, the response was almost universal: “I had no idea.” “You seemed so good on Facebook.” And they were right—they had no idea. Not because I was hiding it maliciously, but because social media only traffics in moments, never in the difficult, grinding reality between them. The workout photo doesn’t show you the nausea or the fear or the exhaustion. It just shows you that I worked out.

I don’t blame anyone for not knowing to reach out during that time. The people close to me knew, and they did reach out. That’s how it should work. But it crystallized something for me about what social media has done to friendship: it’s created an illusion of knowing that replaces actual knowing.

Real friendship lives in the mundane. It’s knowing that your friend is frustrated with their boss, that they’re worried about money, that they had a bad day for no particular reason. It’s the boring texture of daily life, the stuff that never makes it onto Instagram because it’s not photogenic or interesting enough. When your primary window into someone’s life is their social media feed, you only see the peaks—the concerts, the parties, the big wins, the carefully plated meals. You don’t see the valleys, and you definitely don’t see the endless plateau of ordinary days that make up most of living.

I have a good friend I can sit down with and talk about the heavy shit. We share the mundane details, the struggles, the things that aren’t suitable for public consumption. It’s been hard for both of us over the past year, so we haven’t talked as much as we’d like. But we both know we’re doing our best. That knowledge doesn’t come from scrolling through each other’s feeds. It comes from actually talking.

I have another friend who doesn’t like to discuss anything that isn’t superficial—unless it’s their own situation and they want to talk about it. They post constantly on social media: every thought, every problem, every crisis. Some of it is genuine. Some of it feels performative, like problems are being magnified to garner sympathy and attention. It can be hard to tell which is which unless you really know someone. And here’s what troubles me: some people seem to feel they have no value unless they’re in a crisis where others will want to reach out and help. Social media enables and even rewards that pattern.

This gets at something that’s been bothering me more and more: the way social media creates a false sense of reciprocity. I’ve caught myself scrolling specifically to “check in” on someone instead of just messaging them. Especially during COVID, when we were all isolated and desperate for connection, I’d scroll through feeds looking for updates on people I cared about. But I wouldn’t reach out directly. Sometimes I told myself they probably didn’t want to talk to me specifically. Sometimes it was just easier to passively observe than to risk the vulnerability of actual contact.

But passive observation isn’t friendship. It’s surveillance with a friendly face.

The mutual silence that develops between people who used to be close is perhaps the saddest part of all this. We both scroll past each other’s posts, we both think about reaching out, and we both stay silent. We assume that if something were really wrong, we’d see it. We’d get an update. But what if we don’t? What if, like me during cancer treatment, or like me during this past year of burnout, the person is suffering in the gaps between posts?

This is what terrifies me about the current state of connection: when something terrible happens to someone, when they lose their mental health struggle or succumb to despair, people inevitably say, “I had no idea.” And they mean it. They really didn’t know. But they also weren’t asking. They were waiting for an update that never came.

All of these superficial connections—the 297 friends, the likes and comments, the birthday notifications—they feel pointless when measured against that reality. They feel worse than pointless. They feel like they might actually be preventing real connection by letting us believe we’re already connected.

I really like Brené Brown’s marble jar theory—the idea that trust is built in small moments, marble by marble, through the accumulation of tiny interactions that show someone is paying attention and showing up. Social media wants us to believe we can fill the jar with one viral post, one big announcement, one perfect photo. But that’s not how trust works. That’s not how friendship works.

The question I’m sitting with now is whether any of us can break the habits that social media has built—the reflexive scrolling, the passive observation, the assumption that seeing equals knowing. Whether we can rebuild the muscle of real connection, the kind that requires vulnerability and risk and the possibility of bothering someone who doesn’t want to be bothered.

I don’t have the answers. I’m still figuring out what authentic friendship looks like in a world that’s convinced us that scrolling through someone’s highlight reel is the same as knowing them. That liking their posts is the same as showing up. That having 297 friends online is the same as having even one person who will call and ask, point blank, if you’re okay.

What I do know is this: I’m tired of the illusion. I’m tired of feeling disconnected from people whose vacation photos I’ve seen. And I’m starting to understand that real connection might mean knowing less about more people, and more about fewer people.

It’s a harder way to live. But it might be the only way that actually counts.