I deleted the Facebook app off my phone today. It felt waaay too much like chopping a limb off my own body, so yeah, pretty good sign I made the right choice. Don’t get me wrong, I didn’t like delete-delete my entire account. Don’t be insane. You can’t just break a 10 year addiction without professional help. I can still log into my account from a desktop, but ugh, that takes so much effort. So deleting the app is a solid first step in my recovery process.
I leave this here so no one has to go cold turkey without my cat FB posts. I’m not heartless.
There are obvious reasons for going on a Facebook elimination diet, and this is just off the top of my head: election interference, foreign hackers, data theft, privacy violations, trolls, bots, fake news, manic influx of news, FOMO, humble-bragging, straight-up-bragging, cyber bullying, cyber stalking, cyber adultery, super-creepy targeted ads, emojis replacing emotions, time-wasting, brain-sucking, soul-sucking, the juxtaposition of feeling both connected to people and disconnected from people at the same time, fake profiles, and real profiles which portray perfectly curated lives that make us feel horribly inadequate even though those people totally have problems too but who’s gonna post about a shitty life so it’s all just fake anyway.
OH MY GOD WHAT ARE WE DOING TO OURSELVES??? THE VERY FABRIC OF SOCIETY IS SHREDDING IN FRONT OF OUR EYES!!!
I had every intention of following the list of awful things with a list of good things, but now I’m at a loss. Seriously. I was going to say I love Facebook because it connects me to long-lost friends, but email and phone calls do that. And I’d argue they do it better–they are intentional and personal. Whereas a Facebook post is mass communication. OK, sure, you post on “your” wall to “your” friends–all one thousand four hundred and twelve of your “friends”. And maybe 12 comment. Awesome. Great connecting with you Jane from high school–I feel totally caught up on your life and can see that you’re doing well by the thumbs up you placed below the photo of my cat. Ahh, the warm fuzzy of human connections, am I right???
And I was going to say I love Facebook for all the fun banter and photos of friend’s lives, but you know where else I can have fun banter and see my friend’s lives??? IN REAL LIFE. So if you’ll excuse me, I’m gonna get off my couch now and reintroduce myself to the world.
Maybe detoxing Facebook isn’t going to be nearly as difficult as I thought…
What's KP Thinking? 