Photo Matt Kulesza (L) with friend Joshua Poly-Goldschläger.

In this day and age, we are more apt to strike up a conversation with someone we don’t know personally through social media than we are with the person sitting next to us on the bus or the subway. Australian student Matt Kulesza Wants to rekindle good old fashioned face time with real, live human being. So he is taking the next 3 years to meet and have coffee with each and every one of his 1,000 friends on Facebook.

He calls his goal the “1000+ Coffees” project. He started in September and sees the endeavor as an opportunity to leave the “book” behind while reminding himself to socialize and get to know people ‘IRL’ or in real life.

As of this past Thursday, Kulesza had already met and had coffee with 26 of his “friends.” He is chronicling his meetings on both his Facebook page and on his Tumblr account. He uses photos and summaries of their conversations as well as descriptions of what they were drinking to capture each meeting.

He plans to meet with 5 people each week for the next 3years until he has met all 1,000. He doesn’t see this as a chore but rather as fun. He says he likes having coffee with people.

Each meeting provides insight into his friend. They discuss more than just coffee. Kulesza says no topic is off limits. Politics, pop culture and even tarot cards have been discussed with equal enthusiasm.

Kulesza says it amazes him how at school, everyone sits waiting for the lecturer to arrive and stared mindlessly into their phones. No one speaks to the people around them anymore. His “1000 Coffees” project should serve as a wakeup call to the rest of us that life is about the human touch and the connections we make IRL.

Mark Montagnani is the owner of a cafe that 87-year-old Iris Thomsen regularly goes to. When Iris didn’t turn up like she usually does, the alarm bells went off for Mark. His gut told him something wasn’t right. Thank God he listened to that voice and actioned on it, because it’s the action he took that ended up saving her.

He checked Iris’s hairdresser’s to see if she’d been lately, and she hadn’t, neither had she cancelled the appointment she’d booked there. That’s when he went with a colleague to her place of residence to check up on her. When they went in, poor Iris was lying on the floor as she’d taken a fall and had broken her hips.

The accident had happened two hours previously, so you can imagine how quickly his intuition kicked in when she didn’t turn up.

Iris must have been scared lying there on the floor, on her own, trying to get help. She was lucky to have been found so soon after the fall. Mark’s an angel.

She’s recovering, which is great.