The future is made up of realities and choices, and at any given time there are many pathways to it. The choices include the people around you, the actions that you take with them and the actions they take with you - as well as the interactions of the whole mess of that with the realities of the environment as seen by everyone involved... even those not in the 'network'.

Last week I lost a friend who I had known only for a year. He didn't use Twitter or Facebook; he started off herding cows and built a multi-million dollar automotive-related business from there based on risk-taking, sound decisions and most of all - hard work. You could eat on his reputation. In fact, many did due to his generosity. So after losing him last week, knowing that the world was a lesser place without him and also knowing that pathways had closed I considered it all very deeply.

When I posted on it on Facebook, I got messages of support. But no one knew this person, and it almost seems like sacrilege to write about him on these sites because he was more real than the majority of people who follow my doings here, there, or anywhere. When all my other real friends became distant - perhaps because I began to get dirt under my fingernails (how distasteful!) and being as hands on as I usually am while damning the pseudo-aristocracy, this friend was someone who wanted nothing from me. I wanted nothing from him. For both of us in that environment - in this environment - that is a luxury. In a world where people beat on our doors because we're sympathetic and casually empathetic, we allowed ourselves the abuses and pointed out that our weaknesses and strengths were synonymous. While we gave, we never took for nothing and we never leeched others to get what we have or what we wanted... or even what we needed.

I offered this friend a website once to help his business. We paused for a moment and both laughed because, quite simply, he didn't need it. He didn't need to magnify who he was, or even fake who he was - and the same went with his business ventures. And, strangely, none of my other friends actually knew this friend. Why? Probably the same reason that so many friends haven't taken an active interest in what I'm doing on my land. Many of them only visited when I was pondering selling the land, and when I decided to be much more conservative they suddenly lost interest.

Obviously they do not see what I do. Maybe they think I'm wasting my time. Maybe they believe the sun is too hot, or maybe they think it rains too much. Maybe they're so ashamed of themselves that they lock themselves in their enclaves and bubbles that allow them to... not be ashamed of themselves. Maybe they are just busy. And I am forced to wonder whether they are friends at all, though not too much because the illusion - whatever the depth - feeds a very dark part of the soul. And one thing I have come to know over the decades of experiences shoved into a short lifetime is that the dark part of the soul is where the light part of the soul plants its roots.

And when I reflect upon that it is difficult to balance that with this word of electrons, websites, blogs, social networks and unproductive popularity contests within them. Where is the substance? When I jokingly started a Twitter account last week, I posted it on Facebook as part of the joke. Apparently no one bothered to translate 'Nihil curo de ista tua stulta Twitter.'

I am not interested in your foolish Twitter.

Within 24 hours, I had double digits of followers on Twitter even though I've vociferously stated that it was a waste of time in the past and even made the point, albeit in a roundabout way, in my first and only... 'tweet'. It really should be called a 'twit', by the way. It describes most of the nonsense more accurately.

In all of this context, I openly wonder at the value of the Pathways of Life associated with social networks. When one friend found his daughter had a disease, he was overwhelmed with responses while I found out much later and my own words were diluted by the well of electrons that formed on his page. Electrons have no weight in the context of emotion. Maybe placing or misplacing facts gives electrons weight, but being human is more than that. Being human isn't about offering condolences for a lost friend but sharing them.

Someone talked about the issue of how my friend died at his funeral, and what could have been done differently - which is considerable, all told. But I said that I would rather remember how the man lived rather than how he died, and I mean that. It isn't that the condolences offered are misplaced - they are simply detached from the reality of how the man lived because they didn't know him. And social networks are full of that lack of weight and depth.

Connections aren't friends. Social networks aren't pathways. Life is a very different sort of thing than the things we create to emulate it - perhaps attempting to fill voids or escape the reality of our lives. And perhaps, too, social networks - electronic or simply economic - are eclipses of the pathways of our lives.

Or maybe we're all just full of it. Or, more likely, both.