Well, not quite yet. I was hoping to totally shut down my Facebook account but it’s still the the easiest way my long distance friends and family can keep in touch with me. Everyone else has been blocked. If they want to chat, call me and if they want to catch up, we can meet up and have a good old fashioned face to face. Going forward, my Facebook is only for family members and friends that moved far away.
So why did I do this? The answer’s quite ironic. I’ve left the social network to become more social. I’ve been on Facebook since 2007 and since 2007, I’ve been seeing my friends less and less and interacting with them on Facebook more and more. I’ve seen friends who used to be quite humble and reserved become egotistical and narcissistic. I can’t say I wasn’t guilty of that as well.
To be honest, I’ve tried to keep my list of friends lean and mean for a while now and tried to keep my list down below 100. It astonishes me to see some people with hundreds or even thousands of friends. Have these people actually spoken to 1000 others in the past year and know them well enough to be added as friends? The people I trimmed off my list were people who haven’t spoken with in over 2 years. There were friends from highschool that went through the trouble of seeking me out but once I acknowledged their friend request, they never said a thing. Now why would you seek me out if you didn’t want to communicate? Did they forget why we grew apart over the years in the first place? So that was the first group I culled.
The second group were the friends of friends. People who I met through friends, hung out with as a group and added me to Facebook. I accepted their friend request on the basis that we’d communicate and become friends instead of just being friends of friends. Some did and some didn’t, the ones that didn’t were deleted. Funny thing about this group is many of them don’t even remember being connected on Facebook. Many of them send me another friend request months after I’ve deleted them. They’re now blocked.
The third group was the hardest to delete because they’re mostly my closest friends. There they were on my friends list for years but as the years went on, I noticed many of them becoming more and more self centered. I can’t say I wasn’t guilty of that as well. I thought about it last year and decided it wasn’t a path I wanted to go down and I purged all my posts. I didn’t post anymore and just logged on maybe a few times a week. Every time I logged in, I noticed the self centeredness was getting worse. No longer were they using Facebook to keep in touch, they were just posting about themselves. My feed was littered with self pictures, pictures of every meal they had and updates of everything they’re doing. What’re you supposed to talk about when you hang out with your friends and you already know what they’ve been up to? It’s made it no longer fun to hang out with your own friends. It was tough but now they’re gone as well which leaves only family and friends that aren’t easy to hang out with because they’re far far away.
I’m hoping I made the right move that will bring back some excitement and mystery in my life. Maybe we’ll have something to talk about face to face. I’ll no longer be posting updates or accepting friend requests. If you need to get a hold of me, please don’t do it through Facebook and call me! Remember when people used to do that with their phones?
