Facebook is Dead To Me
Yesterday, quite unceremoniously, I bid adieu to Facebook. It’s been a long time coming, and it was a steady and determined process that led to my final decision.
I used to be obsessed with Facebook. Not to an extent that was particularly unhealthy, but logging in up to ten times a day was probably a little on the high side. I’m sure that I was probably closer to the middle of the pack in terms of Facebook usage, but it was definitely detracting from my work, my personal life, and the relationship I was in at the time. I would update my status several times a day just a few months ago. In the past few weeks, I had only updated it a handful of times. I was tired of it.
I wasn’t necessarily bored with Facebook, but I had realized that Facebook wasn’t helping my social life, it was simply making a mockery of it. I had over 400 friends, but most of them are a mish-mash of people I hadn’t spoken to since high school, people I had never actually met, exes, friends of exes, and assorted people whose every last move I don’t really care about anymore. Sure, I could delete them as friends, but I think I’d be overly concerned that someone would take it personally. That’s backwards logic, since I really don’t know these people and shouldn’t care what they think, but I’m not the type who likes to offend anyone. It really hit me when I was scrolling through my list of friends, saw a name, and asked myself, “who the hell is that?” It happened more than once.
I can’t recall what the purpose of joining Facebook originally was, but everything that seemed to be advantageous about it a few months ago is everything I hate about it now. I hate that every bit of news that I get about my friends is filtered through Facebook. I hate that I rarely get phone calls from friends anymore because they figure a simple status update will suffice. I hate that I learn about my friends’ marriages, relationships, breakups, and new jobs from Facebook, and when I don’t, I learn about them from a friend who saw it on Facebook. I enjoy personal communication, but Facebook has seemed to replace that entirely.
The straw that broke the camel’s back was the never-ending “25 Things You Didn’t Know About Me” meme. It got completely out of hand - so much so that it was in today’s New York Times. At least half my friends ultimately did it, and many of them “tagged” me to encourage me to do the same thing. I’m 27 years old, and most of my friends are well into their 20s as well. I think I did one of these lists in an e-mail chain in high school ten years ago. If you’re my friend, and there are 25 things I don’t know about you, they’re probably some very mundane things. But it persisted. A few people stood up and insisted the trend was getting out of hand, but more of these lists came up, and more friends encouraged me to make one of my own. The very same moment I poked fun at the fact that these lists were taking up valuable space on my news feed, two more appeared in my news feed. Facebook was becoming a mockery of itself.
So, in two simple clicks, I retired from Facebook. Is it permanent? Maybe. Am I suffering from a little bit of withdrawal? Absolutely. Does it bother me that Facebook appears in my address bar in Firefox, and probably won’t disappear from it for a very long time? You bet. But I’ll deal with being less connected, and eventually, I’ll feel a lot better without Facebook in my life than I ever did with it.
(And to be fair, friends, I’m not giving up on social media entirely. You can still follow me on Twitter, if you absolutely have to know what I’m up to and have a massive fear of calling me. And luckily, for now, Twitter won’t let you write 25 things about yourself in one place.)
This entry was posted on Thursday, February 5th, 2009 at 9:01 am and is filed under Geekery. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
February 5th, 2009 at 9:46 am
danie says:1. You can easily remove facebook from your address bar by changing your favorites / deleting your history.
2. I too hate the 25 Random things. I’m trying to wait it out. I agree it’s a chain letter and I half expect someone to tell me I’ll have bad luck in love forever if I don’t do it.
3. I do not think you’ll get more phone calls, or that you would want them. You take the subway (no cell service). You have an ipod and you actually hang out with people doing trivia and what not. Do you really have time to gab?
4. No one knows when they’ve been dropped. You can do it in secret.
February 5th, 2009 at 10:08 am
lozo says:Blogging about why you quit Facebook might be gayer than filling out a meme. It’s close. I just hope that Chris Carrara guy doesn’t go anywhere.
February 5th, 2009 at 12:00 pm
Stealthnerd says:I kind of love that one of the options for why you are deleting is “Facebook is resulting in social drama for me.”
February 5th, 2009 at 12:08 pm
Rob says:you’ll be back, they all come back
February 5th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
Bob says:Leaving Facebook in favor of Twitter? This strikes me as silly, but I can’t quite say why. Possibly because I personally just don’t like Twitter’s chat-room-esque ambiance.
February 5th, 2009 at 1:20 pm
Audrey says:I humbly suggest that you retain a barebones Facebook profile so that you can receive event invitations. While I think that people who only send Facebook invites instead of email invites are totally lame, the fact remains that many people who you like (or who you may want to like you - potential employers with networking events) use Facebook to promote their events.
It’s slightly less annoying than Evite because at least you can see who else you know is attending. LinkedIn isn’t chatty enough to serve as an invitation platform - and it may never be that way. I’m not sure if it even has an invitation function.
Anyhow - just a suggestion. You can set Facebook to email you alerts for events, too, so you would never actually have to go to the site.
February 5th, 2009 at 1:36 pm
Bowery Boogie says:i applaud your actions. i wish i could be so bold.
i hated that “25 things” list also. it was so damn bothersome. i remember getting that junk chainmail back when everyone had aol accounts.
February 5th, 2009 at 8:51 pm
TROiSi says:Easier than deleting your entire history in Firefox (which is easy to do, but a pain because it wipes everything), just highlight facebook and any facebook/ related pages and press Shift+Delete.
February 6th, 2009 at 12:51 am
Sarah says:You think you’re wasting too much time and getting too abbreviated a form of information dealing with Facebook, but are okay with Twitter, which is good for nothing but short frequent updates? I mean, nothing wrong with ditching Facebook, but that seems a little backwards.
February 6th, 2009 at 8:01 am
Chris says:TROiSi: I should have been able to figure that out myself. Thanks!
Sarah: I’d say Twitter is much less involved than Facebook. Less drama, fewer complications, no opportunities for “stalking.”
February 9th, 2009 at 12:05 pm
Your Girlfriend is Ugly says:I find Twitter to be way more annoying than being tagged in Fbook.
February 9th, 2009 at 1:00 pm
I’ll Tweet You The Post Title says:[…] became so enraged by these memes, that he quit Facebook today. Then he blogged about it, causing me to wonder if blogging about quitting Facebook was worse than filling out a meme on […]
February 9th, 2009 at 11:21 pm
Todd says:http://www.newsweek.com/id/183180
August 4th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
Max Fiction says:Long on Face, Short on Book - My Experience on Facebook and Why I Quit:
http://maximumfiction.wordpress.com/2009/08/04/long-on-face-short-on-book/
March 17th, 2010 at 6:25 am
Zachary Opiola says:awesome post, i’m gonna bookmark ya!
April 8th, 2010 at 1:39 pm
how to build a generator from scratch says:Seems like such a basic idea for renewable energy but it takes a group of people to discuss the details, thanks, great read, ive added a bookmark for your blog.