About a week ago I decided I didn’t want a personal profile on Facebook anymore. It all started when on one day, for no particular reason, after several years as an avid facebooker I suddenly asked myself “why am I on here?”. Literally nothing spawned it, nothing that I am aware of anyhow, but the question was asked and needed to be answered. I came up very short when trying to think of good reasons why, or even one good reason. Of course, what makes a reason good or not is quite relative in this instance and so my thought process on the matter and the decision I made have only to do with whether or not Facebook makes sense for me, not anybody else.
I meditated on the effects of Facebook on my life in general. Here is what I came up with:
1. Facebook takes up a lot of my time (my very precious time): I admit I was totally addicted to it. I went on everyday more than once a day. I happen to be a person who has a lot of personal and professional ambitions, ideas, and interests. There are many things I have decided I want to do to enhance the quality of my life that require time and focus. Facebook has not helped me in accomplishing any of those things, not even being attentive to the people I care about, which is a top priority for me. In fact my closest friends and I don’t communicate very much at all over Facebook. We call, email, and skype when we are not together. Therefore, most of my communications on facebook are with people who are not a priority in my life. My actual priorities take a backseat everytime I sign on to FB and end up paroozing photos of someone I won’t think about again until the next time I see their name pop up in the newsfeed on Facebook.
2. Some of my friendships have actually become weaker with Facebook: I realize that some people consider “liking” status updates and photos and leaving an occasional comment on something a sufficient way to stay in touch with close friends. Not in my book. If I haven’t heard your voice or at least received an email from you in 6 months, I’d say we pretty much lost touch and are now just FB friends, not actual friends. There is a difference as far as I’m concerned. I want more, and I definitely give more.
3. I’ve become totally unmysterious: For years now I’ve shared pictures of myself, family and friends, my thoughts, my interests and my whereabouts with hundreds of people on a daily basis. I am suddenly not attracted to this way of being at all, and kind of surprised at myself for being willing to be that open with every single person I have ever met, and then some. In my personal life (the in-person one) I have more defined boundaries and choose to expose parts of myself and who I am to those with whom I have established some sort of rapport. For some reason on FB boundaries didn’t play such a strong roll. Everyone is basically equal; your neighbor from 2nd street that you haven’t seen since 1985 may find out about your bad day before your spouse. How weird is that? I suddenly find that ludacris.
4. I’ve acquired an overload of useless information: whether I ever sought out to learn such things or not, I now know things such as Donna Lewis (name has been changed) LOVES Fridays. For the last few hundred weeks in a row, she has posted a “TGIF” (sometimes followed by a “woo-hoo”) status update on Friday mornings. Guess what? She hates Mondays. I had 500 friends at one point, I’m sure you can imagine all the other things I learned. I have absolutely no need to know where everyone I know is at every moment of every day. Absolutely no need.
Now, I must say that I definitely enjoyed certain things about Facebook. Occasionally someone would post something that inspired me or made me smile, and that was great. It was very exciting in the beginning to re-connect with people from my past who I totally lost track of. I found my best friend from kindergarten! That was cool. But at this point, the excitement has worn off. I found, or was found by, every single person who I could ever hope to be reunited with (plus many others) within the first year. By the end of the second year I knew way more about most of their lives for someone who really doesn’t “know” them than I should, and vice-versa. By the third year I was no closer in any meaningful or life-enhancing way to any of those people I found or who had found me. By now, I’m over it.
I like things that make me think and reflect. The majority of the content on Facebook has not provided me with very much opportunity to do that. Instead it has caused me to zone out & mindlessly scroll through status updates, profile pages, & photographs of people who would find it weird if I ever phoned them up to chat. I know many people feel FB is a great way to keep in touch with people, and that’s fair enough. As for me, I prefer to hear from a more distant friend once or twice a year who thought of me out of the blue and wanted to reach out, then once a week while in the process of liking multiple status updates and posting greeting comments on numerous friends’ pages of which I am just one. And if it takes seeing my name in the newsfeed for them to remember me, it’s ok if I never hear from them at all.
So now I’m at the point where I realize:
I don’t have time for Facebook
I am only willing to share the more personal parts of myself, my thoughts, and my life with actual friends & others with valuable shared interests
I want to focus more energy on learning even more about the important people in my life & others who truly interest me instead of sqandering time daily observing the lives of hundreds of people from a distance
That’s basically it. I feel that Facebook served its purpose at one time. I enjoyed it. Now it’s time to move on. I’m in the mood for a little more depth, a little more quality, and a little more congruity these days. And I have to admit, I don’t miss it one bit. It was time.
Be you and enjoy it!
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. That’s pretty cool!
