Sixty-four floors above Las Vegas Boulevard on a nightclub terrace, I feel like I’m back in my high school cafeteria. Familiar faces gather around small tables, only this time clutching cocktails and smartphones instead of diet sodas and brown-paper lunch bags. The buzz of constant conversation hangs in the air, though every time the door opens, people awkwardly stare in its direction. This is my 10-year high school reunion.

*****

I thought hard about whether or not to buy a ticket. I was a marching-band nerd on the Varsity Quiz team a decade ago, so taking a time machine back to the halls of Green Valley High for an evening hardly seemed like a candidate for Best Night Ever. And in the weeks leading up to it, my old classmates shared a similar sentiment: Why do we need a reunion? We have Facebook.

The social-media juggernaut launched in February 2004, so a lot of us already had accounts by our June 2005 graduation. I did. We could stay Friends or become Friends, join exclusive groups to build curated communities, message each another about the day’s gossip and strategically edit our images with this digital phenomenon. Sounds a lot like high school.

It (probably) goes too far to say the social network and others like Twitter and Vine have taken the place of face-to-face interaction. But have they made the tradition of reuniting with your high school class sort of pointless? We’ve already stayed connected, through Grumpy Cat memes, job-promotion updates, Buzzfeed recipe videos, baby announcements and cryptic emoji rows. Still, curious about the modern feel of the reunion ritual, I decided to attend (plus, I really wanted to see my senior prom date).

*****

A decade later, and the homecoming and prom courts are still palling around with Student Council types, the baseball and soccer players’ fraternity as tight as ever. At the same time, choir kids are hanging with jocks and AP geeks are chatting up members of the goth crew. My high school self might have faded into a corner, but in 10 years, I’m among those who’ve branched out from Breakfast Club paradigms. Social lubrication might have something to do with it, as our open-bar budget is cashed halfway through the event (thank you McCallan triples). Facebook, too, as I don’t feel the disconnect of years without seeing most of these faces.

According to a 2014 study by the Pew Research Center, 74 percent of all Internet users are on social-networking sites, and that jumps to 89 percent for the 18-29 age group. We Millennials like to post, tweet, snap and share—and judging by the excessive selfie-taking in this boozy cafeteria in the sky, many of my classmates will do just that. But will I ever see their digital missives? My prom date (who looks fabulous) and others I’ve stayed close to aside, I rarely interact with these people online, despite the fact that we’re Friends. We can choose who’s in our circles and what to click for a sharper view, but an algorithm decides what’s important for us to see. And what we reveal can literally be edited. So the sense of connection is inescapably hollow.

As the night unfolds, conversation after conversation makes this clear. (Apparently, I’m a socialite?) I know a lot about my peers on the terrace—if they’re married, if they have kids, where they went to college and grad school, what they do for a living and where they call home—all because of Facebook. But talking to my Facebook-friended classmates IRL lets me see them light up when they talk about their kids and hear sweet details about significant others I know only through wedding photos (a husband who crafts the best cocktails at a luxurious bar on the Strip, kicking ass without a high school diploma). I get to laugh with a former coworker about our old lifeguarding jobs (he greeted me by my pool nickname, “Markocious Brocious Cocious!”). And thanks to having this time with my friend Haley, the next time I’m in San Diego I’m calling her for a hophead-guided tour.

*****

While it was nice to see the Friends I actually want to be friends with, let’s be honest, there’s a pretty pervasive curiosity surrounding reunions. Everyone wants to see who got fat, who got hot, who’s insanely rich, and who’s being a Bragasaurus Rex for no goddamn reason.

In that sense, Facebook is aggressively killing the high school reunion. It’s easy to keep up with the superficial and materialistic stuff via social media. Want to know if Most Athletic got a beer belly? If Most Likely to Succeed is succeeding? Profile pictures on Facebook and quick LinkedIn searches reveal all. But seeing that someone lost weight doesn’t tell you what inspired the transformation. You can look up a job title, but it says nothing about that person’s passion.

Chatting with our valedictorian, her passion for her work is obvious. We never hung out or even said hello in high school, but because we’re standing next to each other in the bar line, I learn a lot more about her, and the engineering industry. We aren’t friends or even Friends, and probably never will be, but it’s an interesting conversation that wouldn’t have happened otherwise—when else am I going to talk to a chemical engineer? Or a very old friend I thought I’d lost, who has refrained from social media because of her line of work. She’s part of the other side of that engagement stat, the 11 percent of my age group not uploading selfies and life updates—and those people might just be the reasons to go to your reunion.

I was standing alone, for a moment, and she beelined for me. We hadn’t spoken for 10 years (because high school drama, duh), and polite cocktail chatter gave her an opening. She looked in my eyes and said she was sorry—really sorry—and that was she happy to see me, and see me doing well. Her words meant a lot, and I’m guessing that they never would have been typed and posted. Even if they were, they wouldn’t have landed the same. And we definitely wouldn’t be going for drinks this week.

This is why you go to your high school reunion, whether it’s marking 10 years or 50. Because you never know who will show up, you never know who has grown up, and you never know what truths exist beyond those Game of Thrones memes.