Once upon a time on facebook, I was driven by the desire to have smothering numbers of friends. As the friend count shot up from adding and being added by all sorts of people, the contentment plummeted.

Most of these so called friends were just silent observers of the emptiness of my facebook existence. The spontaneity of updating my status to tell the world what’s up, transformed into a grueling act of updating the idealistic and doctored reality.

I became a slave of the routine, maintaining the front. The writings on my wall lacked the genuine concern of friends. I had umpteen friends (not by Eric Wainaina’s standards) but didn’t have any ‘friends’. Yes the numbers were impressive but the essential relationships were non existent. The curse of technology made it easy to access large ‘quantities’ of people but made it almost impossible to have quality relations. What’s the need of having a fire if you couldn’t bask in it, I wondered.

Letting these strangers into my life, these silent observers, wasn’t flattering anymore. It was a scary affair because their eyes were watching. I decided that it was better to have two friends who were the real deal than have multitudes who don’t give a damn.

In a bid to stay connected to reality I had to let go of the ghost list of people who never outgrew their virtual limitations…let go of most of the pages from the book of faces that don’t mean a thing.