About a week ago I decided to cut back on Facebook. And since I don’t moderate certain things very well that means I had to almost entirely cut it out. Oh gosh, I just realized how much that sounded like my mom! (Love you mom! Shall we recite the Serenity Prayer together?)
Basically I’m a reader, information gatherer, someone who likes to be in the know, a snoop . . . and Facebook makes all those things possible. I used to read those Choose Your Own Adventures books with my fingers tucked into various pages throughout the book trying to read all the options, for each of the paths, because it bothered me if I missed any of them. And of course because I was trying to find the best way to go. Facebook is kind of my grownup Choose Your Own Adventure. I get to follow other people’s lives, like reading a story, but I don’t have to talk to anyone or go anywhere or even get out of bed if I don’t want to.
My problem became that I couldn’t just read some of the stories. I’d need to make sure I got down to the bottom where I had read before and then a few beyond that because Facebook has an irritating habit of putting things out of order. And did I read all the replies to the posts? And then I’d refresh a few minutes later and there’d be new stories and wait, I didn’t see that one before! What else am I missing? And there I would go, falling down the rabbit hole.
I loved that it made me feel like a social person without actually having to be social. A writer’s paradise. I can type a few words here and there and make a personal connection with someone who is literally thousands of miles away. But on the flip side it was repetitive — the same “news” articles posted over and over again by different people. Yes, I get that you are passionate about vaccinating/not vaccinating, Donald Trump/Bernie Sanders, Kim Davis the hero/Kim Davis the devil . . . on the bright side, it showed that I have a very wide expanse of friends from both ends of the spectrum (and a few from various corners of the universe). Add in 5 gazillion memes about the topic du jour, and it became a lot less about following the lives of people I know and more about what the people I know had been reading. (Or not reading — hello, people! Meet Google and Snopes. They are your friends. Use them. Posting that you give no one the right to your photos does nothing. Oops, gotta get off my soapbox . . .) The real answer to what am I missing? Nothing.
So we’re on a break. Ish. I moderate a page so I sign in as the admin and check that page and then see if I have any personal notifications. I might see the top post or two when I sign in, but then I’m out. I happened to see these amazing photos of my niece going to homecoming and looking like a grownup (oh my gosh, how old am I now?!) and missing that stuff makes me sad, but in truth Facebook is 1% that and 99% stuff that really doesn’t matter. So I’ll continue this trial run and see how much more time and space it frees up in my real life. So far I’ve been able to catch up with my old friends from Call the Midwife, so I guess that’s . . . nope, that wasn’t the goal. Baby steps, right?