I Miss When Finding Your Friends Required Field work.

There was a time when finding your friends required courage, instinct, gasoline, and a vague rumor from someone’s younger brother.

Now we just text, “Where are you?” and add an address or a pin on a map.

Weak.

Convenient, yes. Civilized, sure. But weak.

I miss when friendship involved light surveillance. You had to drive past three houses, check the driveway, look for a familiar car, see if the garage was open, then decide whether you were socially close enough to knock or if you needed to circle the block once like a coward in cargo shorts.

You didn’t have a location pin.

You had clues.

There’s a bike in the yard.

Somebody’s mom’s minivan is gone.

The basement light is on.

A single Mountain Dew can is sitting on the porch railing, still cold, which means the boys are near.

This was forensic science.

Now every object in my life has an app, and somehow I am less capable than ever. My thermostat has an app. My garage door has an app. My doorbell has an app. My bank, pharmacy, dentist, grocery store, church, insurance company, kids’ school, fantasy football league, and possibly one of my lamps all have apps.

There is an app for my vacuum.

My vacuum has software. To find it. For Location Services… WHY?

This is a machine whose whole job is to eat crumbs and occasionally trap itself under a chair until it dies quietly like a Victorian orphan. It does not need a profile. It needs a support group. If it ends up down the street at a neighbor’s house, it deserves an award.

The problem is not just that everything has an app. The problem is that I never know which app controls which tiny kingdom.

Is the garage door under MyQ, SmartHome, HomeSmart, LiftMaster, Google Home, Apple Home, Actual Home, or That One App I Downloaded While Standing In The Rain Holding A Backpack?

The parking meter wants an app.

The restaurant waitlist wants an app.

The school lunch account wants an app, and it has the emotional energy of a collections agency.

The pharmacy app sends notifications with the urgency of a hostage negotiator, then makes me log in to tell me my prescription is “processing,” which is pharmacy language for “we have heard of medicine.”

And of course, because I have not opened some of these apps since the second Bush administration, when people printed MapQuest directions like sacred scrolls and my cellphone had exactly one app, Snake, they have forgotten everything about me.

My login is gone.

My password is wrong.

My Face ID has been disabled.

The app updated itself and now wants to “enhance my experience,” which apparently means moving every button, logging me out, and asking me to accept new terms written by a lawyer who has never made eye contact with sunlight.

So now I’m resetting a password for a thing I use once a year.

Once.

A year.

That is not a relationship. That is an annual inconvenience with branding.

I’m standing in a parking lot, trying to pay for one hour of parking, and the app says, “We need to verify your identity.”

You do not need to know who I am.

You need to know I have $2.75 and that I fear authority.

Then it sends a code to my email. My email wants a password. My password is saved in another app. That app needs to update. The update needs WiFi. The WiFi wants me to agree to terms. The terms want my soul in PDF form.

Meanwhile, a man nearby puts four quarters into the meter and walks away like he was raised by wolves with good financial habits.

I nearly follow him.

“Sir, teach me your ways. Do you also know how to sharpen a pencil with a knife? Can you start a fire? Do your friends know where to find you without checking a blue dot on a screen?”

Because that’s the part I miss.

Not the inconvenience exactly. I don’t miss being stranded outside a movie theater because someone said “meet at seven” and then interpreted time as a loose artistic concept. I don’t miss calling a house phone and having to make conversation with a friend’s dad who answered like he was personally defending the property from pirates.

“Hello?”

“Hi, is Matt there?”

“Who’s this?”

A full investigation.

And you had to say your name with confidence, like a defendant.

But there was something solid about it. You had to show up. You had to know places. You had to remember where people might be.

Friendship had geography.

The mall fountain.

The basketball court behind the school.

The booth at Pizza Hut with the cracked red seat.

The one gas station where everyone parked for no reason, as if the county had officially designated it Youth Headquarters.

You could not silently hover over someone’s location and say, “Why are they there?” You had to wonder like God intended.

You had to wait.

That was good for us, probably.

Horrible, but good.

Now I can contact anyone instantly, which means I am somehow in touch with everyone and connected to almost no one. We have entire conversations made of thumbs up reactions and “lol” typed with the emotional depth of a receipt printer.

Nobody is lost anymore, but somehow we’re harder to find.

I’m nostalgic for a version of life where the tools were worse but the excuses were better. “I couldn’t find you” used to be a complete sentence. Now it sounds suspicious. Now there are read receipts, location sharing, timestamps, screenshots, and enough digital evidence to convict you in friendship court.

Back then, you could disappear for an afternoon and return with no explanation except, “We ended up at Jason’s.”

Nobody asked which Jason.

There were four.

It didn’t matter.

Eventually, I reset the password.

The parking app accepts my payment. It thanks me for choosing convenience, which feels aggressive.

Then it asks if I want to enable notifications.

No.

Absolutely not.

If my friends need me, they can check the gas station.

-G