When a friend dies, the algorithm falls silent: friendship & grief today
We live amid digital echoes and fading connections. Yet when a friend dies, the quiet truth breaks through. Social media gives us false proximity, and real connection arrives in other ways.
In the early years, social media offered the false comfort of simulated proximity and endless friendship: if we wanted (and often even if we didn’t), we could keep track of friends, family, former classmates, colleagues, and near-strangers. Once added, their presence remained flattened into a quiet square on a grid until we removed them or the algorithm stopped showing them.
It was like having friends on a loop. We didn’t realize it was actually a spiral—less like circling back, more like drifting apart with each turn. A gentle unraveling, shaped not by intention but by the algorithms dictating how and when we engage.
We’ve come full circle. Few still believe in the naïve promise that these feeds could preserve “real connection.” We scroll now more out of habit than hope. And when someone we actually cared about disappears—when they stop posting, or worse—we often don’t notice until too late. Their digital shadow lingers, updated years ago, frozen in youth or optimism.
At best, our digital selves are poor proxies. They miss the quiet texture of voice, of glance, of private humor. They can’t tell you what someone smelled like after a long restaurant shift, or how they laughed with their whole chest after a few drinks on a weekend in college.
And lately, I’ve realized that when something serious happens—when a real bond matters—people will still try to reach you the old way.
A text that arrived on June 1st
A few weeks ago, I had just begun my day when a name lit up my phone: someone I hadn’t heard from in over fifteen years. We’d grown up in the same town, worked together waiting tables through college. His message came through as a simple text. I didn’t know how he’d gotten my California number, but I appreciated the effort.
There was no preamble: just “Hi,” followed by a cold, precise question: “Did you hear about RM? Has anyone told you?”
I was on a dirt path in the East Bay hills, the sun barely up. Below me, the San Francisco Bay shimmered—Oakland, the flats, Mount Tamalpais rising in the distance. The voice assistant read the message aloud, and suddenly I was no longer there. I fumbled for the screen, reread the words, and understood.
My reply was just as curt: “I know nothing. What happened?”
This friend and I had once shared long shifts and longer nights. We thought nothing of staying out until dawn, of getting back to work hours later, of making music or plans or mistakes. There was an energy then that felt infinite.
When the following message came, I was still standing there, motionless.
“RM died yesterday on the mountain. Heart attack. They couldn’t save him.”
Parallel realities
So much I wanted to know. So much that didn’t need to be said. The man texting me is as reserved as I am. Neither of us reaches out often enough, I have the feeling. So the fact that he said more than the words themselves. It meant something.
At that moment, it was as if reality punctured through the screen—revealing how little the feeds and filters convey. We think we’re “in touch” with someone because their face floats by once in a while. We remember them in their prime, with smiling kids, or at a wedding, or next to a mountain. But behind those photos, people change. Sometimes, they thrive. But they also suffer. They drift. They can die. From middle age onwards, mortality is a thing.
And yet, in that moment, standing high above the Bay with a buzzing phone in hand, I felt something deeper: it wasn’t something I’d call grief, but a reconnection to a part of myself. A message in a bottle, not from the past but about the past—a quiet acknowledgment of our shared youth, now disappearing behind us.
I texted back. Said I was out, would reach him again when I got home. And then, without thinking, I took a steep trail down the hill I normally avoided. It was shorter, more direct. I wanted to be back and show my respect. Yet, by the time I’d travel to Europe for part of the summer, weeks would have gone by. Presence and absence have a whole different meaning for people living abroad who’ve had full trajectories in other places.
Thinking about this, I noticed the landscape more vividly than usual: the eucalyptus and oak, the dry grasses, the birdsong. I wasn’t listening to a podcast or a voice note. I was present, aware of the fragility of it all. Aware that we are, at this age, straddling something difficult.
Impermanence
Impermanence isn’t a purely Eastern concept. We all begin to feel it in middle age—not as a theory, but a rhythm in the bones. Our children grow independent, our parents start to need us in ways they never did before (we see their fragility, and they go from caring about us to letting us care about them). Friends divorce. People get sick. And sometimes, without warning, someone disappears.
Later that day, once home, my old friend and I continued the conversation in voice notes and texts, asynchronously. He told me about RM’s later years—how he’d lived near the symbolic Catalan mountain of Montserrat with his daughters, hiking often, still chasing elevation. He’d shared custody after splitting with his partner. He still found peace on the trails. He died doing something he loved.
And that made me reflect on people’s trajectories.
I also visited RM’s social profiles. They were still there, still active. But they told me almost nothing of who he had become. The posts were sparse, the photos old. There were no signs of what had come in between.
We talk a lot about friendship in our culture, but very little about the specific shape of male friendship—especially as we age. It often fades quietly, not out of anger, but entropy. Life pulls us apart. The depth remains, but the texture dissolves.
The philosopher Michel de Montaigne famously wrote about his friend Étienne de La Boétie, who died young. Montaigne never quite recovered from the loss. Their bond was so singular that Montaigne wrote:
“If a man were pressed to say why he loved him, he could only answer: because it was he, because it was I.”
RM wasn’t La Boétie to me, though knowing him, and knowing how much he cared about people, I’m sure others will feel his absence like Montaigne did.
Actual friendship (beyond performative social media)
In a more atomized and distracted age, those rare male friendships that survive into middle age carry even more weight. They are seldom spoken about, almost never posted. But when tested—by illness, distance, or death—they show us who we were, and what still matters.
We are not meant to carry life’s weight alone. And yet many of us do, quietly. The death of a friend can crack that silence open. It reminds us how deeply we cared, and how rarely we said so.
That text from the mountain—delivered by a man I hadn’t seen in years—wasn’t just bad news. It was a call back to something real. To the meaning behind the shared table, the tired feet after a shift, the beer after work, the look that says, “We made it.”
We don’t always stay in touch. But when the time comes, a true friend will still find a way.
Weeks went by, and I finally traveled to Barcelona. I had promised the friend who had reached out to tell me about RM’s passing that I’d get back in touch—that maybe we could have a coffee somewhere in the city. Things got complicated: a tight schedule, constant travel, a heatwave settling over Europe. But this time, I didn’t let it slide.
Two days before flying back to the Bay Area, we met up—he and I, and another old friend—at a bar terrace in the city. There was too much to catch up on, so we didn’t try. We didn’t recite our resumés or attempt to summarize our lives like an AI scraping outdated social media profiles. We just talked. About RM, about music, about small things.
It felt good. Real. There was no performative grief, no curated memories. Just the three of us sitting there, holding space for someone who wasn’t coming back. It was, in our own quiet way, a kind of presence. A way of saying: you mattered to us.
Absence (and presence)
Then my friend told me about the gathering. A few days earlier, in the hills near our hometown—the place we and RM had once left behind—around fifty people had come together. RM’s two daughters were there, still so young. His relatives. Friends from different stages of his life: school, work, travel, relationships. People who had known different versions of him.
They walked together. They sang. They shared stories. And at the end, they planted a small olive tree in the soil where RM’s ashes had been scattered. A quiet act of permanence, in the face of impermanence.
When we said goodbye, I asked him to send me a photo of the gathering. I hadn’t seen anything online, which felt right. It wasn’t something for the feed. He did send them. A few simple images: people smiling, arms around one another, the olive sapling catching the light. Nothing dramatic. Just presence, again.
Grief is strange in the digital age. So much of our public selves is filtered, scheduled, endlessly shareable. But death doesn’t care about networks or notifications. It moves us in older ways. It finds us through a text message. It sits beside us on a terrace in the heat. It asks us to remember, not with a post, but with a presence.
And sometimes, it invites us to walk a familiar hill, and plant something that might outlive us all.
Amor fati is difficult
As I looked at the photos of the olive tree, I thought of Nietzsche’s idea of amor fati—the love of fate—not as resignation, but as a kind of courageous affirmation: to embrace everything that happens, even loss, even death, as not only necessary, but meaningful.
To say yes to life, not despite its fragility, but because of it. RM’s death was a rupture, but also a reminder: that what made those years vivid was not their duration, but their presence, their texture, the way we laughed and worked and stumbled forward together.
Montaigne, centuries earlier, wrote not to transcend death but to make peace with it—“to practice dying” was, for him, to practice living wisely. He found, in friendship and in reflection, a way to accept that we are temporary, and that this temporariness makes love, memory, and camaraderie all the more real.
We walk away from these encounters with grief changed—not just saddened, but sharpened. We feel the brevity of it all. And if we’re lucky, we learn to say yes to it anyway. Not to the tragedy, but to the totality. To love the spiral. To plant something small in the dirt. And let it grow.
These words resonate so much...what a read! Greetings , Jeroen