I think everyone has heard about the “Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon” concept. Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you know it is based on the “Six Degrees of Separation” idea, the theory that every two persons living on Earth are connected by at most six other persons that know each other, in a chain of inter-personal bonds.

I think the progress in technology and social media has reduced this to a maximum of six to only one connection. Everyone is at most a few clicks away, from your neighbour to your high-school crush, to Shaq; a retweet or a reply from your favourite celebrity, a “Seen” message on a joke message that you sent to that famous singer a while ago or a “fuck you” to your local representative into the Government, all and each of these count as a connection. Apparently humanity achieved Nokia’s goal of connecting people, through the usage of digital relationships.

These connections are of various degrees and quality and they evolve just as in-person relationships do. Away from the keyboard, I’m a pretty shy person and I rarely open up to new people, unless I find some good common ground. Then it’s smooth sailing. In the digital space, I always found it easy to find like-minded people frequenting all kinds of circles, be it an IRC channel, a small subreddit, playing games online, and so many more*.

*Not Tinder. Fuck Tinder and all the dating apps. They are not made to make you meet people, they’re made to line up the pockets of greedy corporate execs who are taking advantage of lonely people with false promises and psychologist-researched gamification techniques.

But I don’t want to talk too much about the para-social relationships between regular people and brands posing as people, because the marketing wizards of the 21st century discovered they can use to make people spend more by attaching a human component in their relationship with customers. A “Twitter blue badge”, “instagram verified checkbox”, is just a trick te make you believe that you’re interacting with the real artist, not with the entire business estate behind him. Yeah, sure, Michael Jackson wrote you a message on Facebook yesterday, and it totally was not a marketing manager pushing some new anniversary box set due to be released next month.

It’s somehow baffling how we can spend quality time with our friends when they are in different parts of the world and how involved they are in our life and us into theirs. We use voice chat, text chat, emails and text messages. We share our feelings (and data) with the big corporations like Metaface, iApple and Googlephabet. Hundreds of hours spent on Discord servers voice chats, Zoom group calls, one-on-one Facetime sessions. Tens of gigabytes of memes and reels shared over Whatsapp, hundreds of Youtube videos shared, many of them now deleted. Over two million IRC chat lines. Some people are just a name, others are just a voice, some have a photo, address, pets, dramas, FaceTime, good days and not so good days. We speak, share our thoughts, we play games, talk about our problems, we give advice to each other about what to wear on the New Year’s Eve party. And sometimes we just talk about how their other digital relationships don’t make sense and become emotional rollercoasters.

I have had an online friend that was living in the same town and we started a tech tutorial site before we even met away from keyboard. I would eventually go out with him at a McDonalds for a vanilla shake. We haven’t spoken in years, but I know he’s all well and that makes me happy.

When I left UK, all of my relationships with the people I met there were brutally and forcefully moved into the digital space. Needless to say, because most of them were only circumstantial, they didn’t last. Unfriend, unfollow, see you later, maybe never. There are a few persons that I kept in my friend list and while we don’t talk that often (actually very rarely or sometimes not even at all), they are still dear people to me and I care about them and I’m happy whenever we meet or talk on the phone, or get a random message at 4AM saying: “Deviilllll!”. I love you too.

I have met countless nice persons while playing World of Warcraft. From the distant lands of Kazakhstan to the sunny realm of Portugal, from the cloudy skies of London to the forests of Sankt Petersburg, from the wine-blessed lands of southern France to the never ending snows of Moscow, and even up to Lebanon, Austria, and even Romania, they are all my friends and I enjoy spending time with them.

I’ve tried long distance relationships some time ago. In my case, they never worked. Or they worked only up to a point. The point where they’ve fallen apart. It’s doable, but it’s a lot of work and you never know if it’s going to be worth it, and some people abandon the journey even before it’s started. However, if given the opportunity, I will always go for it, because as maturity sets in, at the end of a failed love relationship you could find a great friend for life. Or not.

And I couldn’t write about “digital relationships” without touching a related topic, as it’s quite recent in my life. It’s about that relationships with persons you’ve known for more than 20 years and now they start anew in a place far away. You’re forced to move into the digital world this relationship with someone that’s basically your brother from another mother and his wife, too. Of course you’ll be happy for them, of course you’ll speak over the phone and do video calls here and there. They’ll visit you and you’ll visit them and spend quality time, but that’s a digital relationship now. And then *bam!* you realize it doesn’t actually matter. The persons involved are the same, they mean the same to you, you’ll just do less spontaneous things together.

Even if these persons are remote, they still mean the world to us, we still care about them, we love them and they are our friends. So as much as the digital can be a complementary part of life, try not to connect all your memories to a keyboard.

Book a flight. Take that trip.