I recently looked up an old film school classmate. I can’t remember what exactly prompted me to enter his name into Google, but for some reason, I did and was saddened to see that he died several years ago. That’s one of the things you have to get used to when you get older: when you Google long-lost friends, the news that pops up is often bad.

For most of my life, running internet searches on old friends has been sort of fun. You suddenly ask yourself, Hey, I wonder what happened to so-and-so, and after a little bit of searching, you can spy on them from afar — see who has gotten rich, fat, and married again (and again) or who has dropped off the face of the earth or lives just around the corner. (That actually happened to me a few years ago.) I said Google searches have been this way “for most of my life,” but that isn’t really true. For most of my life, there wasn’t a Google at all. When you lost track of someone, they stayed lost. But Google and I have grown up together, in a way, and now there’s a nontrivial chance that some of the people I’m searching for are no longer with us. And the only way I would know that is if I have a random burst of curiosity about someone and pull out my phone.