Not Texting, And Being Very Alone

I HAVE A LOT OF FRIENDS. Well, I like to think I have a lot of friends. Many of them live fairly close to me, but many more are scattered all over the country. Almost all of them have been my friends for decades, people I grew up with and went to school with. I have few new friends. I rarely speak to many of my friends. When I do, its usually because I made the effort to do so, phone call or email, and I don't make much effort. My friends make even less. Friendship is difficult to define, exactly. Its a feeling, a state of mind, an opinion. Everybody has a smart phone, but nobody makes phone calls, and nobody answers them. Everybody screens everybody, and voice messages accumulate, unheard. Why bother to take the phone out of your pocket, wehn you can do it later, during a commercial? Smart phones are, have become text messaging machines. Refrain from texting at your own risk. You will be ostracized. No textie, no sexy, no talkie. People prefer the efficient immediacy of texting, both sending and receiving. Somehow you sense we as a culture prefer the avoidance or more direct, personal, intimate communication, such as voice to voice, or, heaven forbid, face to face. We prefer dispensing with amenities, courtesy, gentility. Hell, I dispense with all that stuff no matter what. I refrain from texting because there is a limit to which even I am willing to go to short circuit civility and enhance efficiency, a limit beyond which our society in general seems perfectly willing if not eager to go to that end, and that's goin' some. I keep thinking that if I start texting and join Facebook, all my friends will suddenly appear in droves, and we will make up for lost time. Conversely, I sense somehow that if I do not do these things, I shall slip farther and farther away from mainstream human "civilization", and will end up in a very lonely place.