Call it one extreme political rant, Ellen video, or cat in costume pic too many – I’m quitting facebook. Not to be dramatic, I’m wondering how many others have considered dropping facebook and stepping away. Have any of you quit facebook on almost a whim? If so, why?
I found myself becoming more and more irratated with facebook. One day I actually stepped outside of myself for a minute while I was perusing facebook and thought “why am I logging on if I’m just going to become agitated”? It was a simple epiphany I feel I should have realized a long time ago. Either I’m way ahead of the curve on this, or I’m just on an island and no one else has the same issues I have with social media.
I did a personal facebook experiment recently that I invite others to try. Avoid facebook for one day and then log on and immediately begin hiding posts that bug you. I don’t mean offend you, I mean posts that just don’t interest you or relate to you at all whatsoever. I found myself hiding about 85% of my posts before I realizing I was well on my way to quitting facebook.
Facebook give licenses to too many people to bombard their friends with opinions they would never share with the same people individually. Would a “friend” come over to your house and start spewing extreme left-wing or right-wing politics at your kitchen table? Would they talk about their cat constantly? Would they brag endlessly that their house is too big clean? My real friends wouldn’t.
Maybe it’s the oversharing that bothers me the most. Everyone loves a funny joke, a well-placed inspirational message, a cute photo of the family pet, an update on a nephew’s soccer season. The constant bombardment of all these posts about the same subject matter is causing me to dislike my own “friends”. Did you ever notice that you tend to love the ones on facebook the most that post the least?
So, I’m quitting facebook and I know it’s because I’m being a bit of a curmudgeon. I’ll miss about 10% of the posts but vow to make it up by having real conversations and real interactions in person or on the phone.
