The Death of the "Goodbye"

"So long, Farewell, Auf Weidersehen, Goodbye"

I found myself thinking about the meaning of the word goodbye over the last few days. And it turns out, it doesn't have the same meaning that it used to. I mean, am I right?

Today when you say goodbye, it's more of a ceremony or a ritual than words that you mean. We no longer get the joy of holding onto that last hug or that last "I'll see you soon!" because I know that I'm going to get a text in 5 minutes telling me how bad the traffic is and then I will read about your entire trip home via Twitter. And that's ok. It helps alleviate the challenges that the distance between friends creates.

However, I also believe that this concept serves as a detterent from creating any sense of urgency to see old friends again. Who needs to catch up when you can follow each others lives in pictures online and talk every 5 minutes about what you are doing. What's there to catch up on. Mostly just the past before Facebook timeline was able to document every movement of our day. And we can only tell the same college stories so many times, granted, they will probably still be hilarious. Not to other who weren't there. But to us atleast.

Maybe not the most personal way to handle it, but certainly not the worst.

But what about when you don't want to follow every movement of every day. What about when you need to say goodbye and you need to release these patterns. Can it really be done in today's modern world? Can you really just say goodbye and walk away from anything? If you cancel internet service, you will just get thrown in a database to get contacted over and over again until you sign back up. If you quit the gym they will call and email you constantly to inquire about when you are coming back and what they can do to make your experience better. Even if you move and change your address, you will be filling that address out on official forms and applications for the next 5 years. Goodbye has no real meaning left I believe. It has become and empty threat.

I guess this tied together for me the other night when I was catching up on my Grey's Anatomy (yes, I am one of the 10 viewers that is still following the sagas centered around McSteamy and McDreamy). The guest character watched their husband suffer a slow and painful death as the result of a car accident which left him brain dead. And the seemingly soulless Dr. Yang delivered a monologue about how it would have been easier to have seen the husband die in the car crash, watch a body bag zip up and cart off the remains. Macabre and gruesome...perhaps. But true. There's a sense of closure. A form of goodbye. And if you never really get to say goodbye, how does anything ever end? If goodbye doesn't work, how on EARTH can I get AT&T to stop calling me and asking me to come back to them?

But how can we say goodbye and create and end when there is no way to cut the cord in today's society? Social media, which I have written about on multiple occasions, has taken away our human capacity to say goodbye. Erase that, I won't even put this one on social media. Mainly because I know that if I don't find what I want on Facebook, I will just go out and perform a very simple Google search. Boom, what now?

And as I sit here listening to John Mellencamp's "Thinking About You", I can take this even one step further and identify a phenomenon that I don't think exists anymore:

Don’t mean no trouble
Don’t want to bother you none
Ain’t looking for nothing
Just wondering about you some
If you ain’t got time
To return this call
I understand
That you’re busy and all
But thanks for the memories

We aren't allowed to wonder about anything anymore. Just for a second, let's pretend that you are even able to have someone years in your past (presumably because they were not on Facebook when you thought about them and went to look them up), but your next move wouldn't be to call them- I'm not even sure that is a socially acceptable practice anymore. You would find an email address or phone number (again, probably from your Google search) and text them. New Age Nostalgia, or something of the like.

If we are suffering from a lack of ability to actually say goodbye and move on, we are losing the ability to experience nostalgia. We are too wrapped up in the present. How can you miss something that isn't actually gone? It all feels a little too Kate Winslet in Titanic- "I'll Never Let Go" (mostly because it's not an option).

And on the rare occassion that you actually want to have a real goodbye, that hug at the airport, a drop off at the MARTA Kiss Ride, or that last time your cell phone rings to ask if you want to renew your service, the depth of that once sacred (well, maybe parting ways with the phone company doesn't have the same hallowed experience) act is no longer possible without taking extreme measures. READ: extreme measures means falling off the grid. And if you've read any of my other posts on the social media age, this would basically entail ceasing to exist in the real world.

Sometimes we need to see the body bag. Say goodbye. Be allowed to make a memory that we can hold onto so that we can let go of the rest. The ability to think back on our happy memory, smile about it and not send a text that will inevitably ruin the whole thing (hypothetically speaking, of course).

Closure.

This would be the point in my post where I would say goodbye, bid you adieu, so long, farewell, however you like it best. But I think we all know that you haven't heard the last of me by any means.

So, as goodbye has no meaning, why don't we just go with the more casual, more practical...

Peace out, cub scouts.

P.S.- Don't forget to go see Titanic 3D in theaters, coming this spring. I'll never let go.