In a time when almost everyone lives at least partially through social media, it feels almost impossible to meet someone and not also find them online. You meet someone at a party, in class, at work, or somewhere completely random, and eventually one of you asks the question that has become almost automatic: “What’s your Instagram?” Sometimes you do not even have to ask. The follow comes later that night, or the next morning, and suddenly someone who was a stranger a few hours ago is sitting somewhere in your feed. It has become so normal that when it does not happen, it can feel incomplete.
I have been thinking about this because there is something I actually like about not finding someone online after meeting them. Not because I am against social media. I probably spend more time on Instagram than I should. But there is something about meeting a person and simply leaving them there, in that moment, that feels rare. We are so used to keeping a digital thread attached to every person we meet that the idea of letting an encounter exist entirely on its own can almost feel bizarre.
You have a conversation with someone at a party. You laugh, you talk for an hour, maybe you have an unexpectedly interesting conversation, and then you go home. You do not know what they did the next morning or where they went that weekend. You do not know what they look like on an average Tuesday or what song they posted that afternoon. You just remember them. And strangely enough, that can be enough. I think there is something almost magical about letting a moment stay where it happened. Not knowing everything about someone can make an encounter feel more intimate because there is no immediate way to revisit it, investigate it, or turn it into something that exists beyond the people who were actually there.
There is a scene in The Worst Person in the World, which happens to be my favorite movie, that captures this perfectly. Julie goes to a party and meets a man named Eivind. They spend the night together, talking and flirting, but they deliberately do not exchange their names. At one point, she explains that if he tells her his name, she will be able to look him up on Facebook, and somehow that would ruin the magic of the whole thing. I love that scene because it understands something we have almost forgotten: sometimes knowing less can make an experience feel more real. The possibility of finding someone online changes the encounter before anything has even happened.
Social media gives us access, but access is not necessarily connection. We can know where someone is, what they are doing, who they are with, what they are reading, what they are buying, where they went on holiday, and what they decided to post that morning without actually knowing the person living that life. Information can feel oddly similar to closeness when you receive enough of it, even when the two have very little to do with each other.
Also, there is something exciting about meeting someone again when you have not been following their life from a screen. You do not arrive already knowing what happened to them last weekend. You do not have a mental archive of their outfits, vacations, friends, opinions, and increasingly specific details about their life. You have questions. You get to ask them. The conversation can unfold naturally instead of feeling like a recap of things you have already seen.
What I believe is that not every person we meet needs to become part of our digital world. Some people are meant to be a moment in your life. Someone you met on a train. Someone you spent an afternoon talking to in another city. Someone at a party whose name you remember but whose life you know nothing about. The fact that you cannot immediately find them does not make the encounter less real. If anything, it leaves you with something that social media rarely does: a little room to wonder.
I think that is what we lose when we have access to everyone. Mystery becomes harder to maintain when curiosity can be answered in thirty seconds. Instead of wondering what someone is doing, we can check. Instead of remembering them as we experienced them, we can see how they present themselves. Instead of waiting to run into them again, we can simply watch their story.
And I do not think that is necessarily better. There is something special about a memory that does not come with a photograph, a username, or a notification attached to it. You remember what someone said, the way they laughed, what the night felt like, or how unexpectedly comfortable you felt talking to a stranger. The memory may become slightly distorted over time, but maybe that is part of the point. It belongs to only you.
We do not need to collect everyone we meet. Not every good conversation needs a follow-up, and not every interesting person needs to become accessible. Some encounters can simply end when the night does. That does not make them insignificant. It might actually be what allows them to stay special.
Maybe the lost art is not being offline, it is simply allowing something to exist without needing to follow it.
Image creedit: Raymond Cauchetier; ‘Jean-Paul Belmondo and Jean Seberg in À bout de souffle‘, 1960