Problem is facebook decides what you want to see unless you go to the feed which they make hard. Even then the vast majoritiy of what you see is garbage they share instead of life updates that you want.

I wish there was a better way but life updates still a posted there only. Facebook is the only one that has a concept of this is a for my friends only.

Yeah, I couldn't put it into words on why "Facebook got worse over the years". But that was definitely one of the keys shifts (outside of my friends leaving). I was getting less updates from people I know and more "news that will make you angry" kind of stuff. I probably really "left" around 2017. But 2020 is when I finally got around to freezing the account.

Realistically everything my several hundred friends have to share with me takes maybe 5 minutes a day to go through (close friends of course would call about things that are too personal for facebook so this is about things more distance friends would care about) . There is a lot more money in the handful of people who are scrolling through, finding, and sharing various memes and news that will make you angry (though this is fun if you - like most people - have friends on both the right and the left doing this and so you can see the bias each side is taking) than there is in friends sharing their life which is not lived on facebook (unless your a physically disabled and so you can only live vicariously through others)

  > Of course, the first thing men will say after that meeting is simply "I've been fine, can't complain. How about you?".

Some of this is natural (though I don't believe healthy) but I think some of this is due to social media where people expect others to be aware of all their major events. Ironically I find this aspect of social media fairly dehumanizing. It disincentivizes direct communication. Why tell someone about things they already know? Getting the first account always coveys so much more than a facebook post. Sometimes I think we've forgotten how to talk to one another and read all the communication besides that in text. Text is at such a higher compression rate and it certainly isn't lossless. No matter how many emojis, memes, or images you include.

> Some of this is natural (though I don't believe healthy) but I think some of this is due to social media where people expect others to be aware of all their major events.

I sometimes do this despite not posting any personal stuff on social media. The reasoning here is pretty simple, I usually don't have a full list of all the stuff that happened in the last few years in mind. When meeting someone I see more often, it's quite easy to think about the last week/month and start with the noteworthy events; whereas, when meeting someone after a few years, not only do I need to think about what happened, but also which of those events might interest the person in question and what level of detail is appropriate

> But overall I just kind of accept that sometimes I'll meet up with someone after a few years and realize "oh yeah, they're married now, took a trip to Japan for 6 months, and is getting some local attention from their band they made a few years ago"

This was a big thing I realized, too. For some people in my life I do genuinely want to know about those sorts of things as they are happening, and for those people I'm in frequent contact with them through text, group chat, real-life meetings, etc. But for everyone else, it is completely fine if I hear about those big life updates months or years after they happen, on the less-frequent occasions when we get together and catch up. Some relationships are different, and that's fine.