In the past week or two, there have been a small handful of occurrences on Facebook that left me feeling annoyed. The two “slights,” if you can even call them that, left me ruminating and overanalyzing.
It hit me yesterday – wow. This is stupid. Why am I even wasting time and energy thinking about these things?
As much as I hate Facebook, I am entirely too attached to it and check the page for updates entirely too often. Usually, the thought process for checking Facebook goes something like this:
“Alright, I am done looking through this analytical data. Now it’s time to enter these values in my spreadsheet for me to-WAIT. LET ME CHECK FACEBOOK FIRST.” I check it in the morning before work. I check it multiple times at work on my phone. I check it at long stoplights (clarification – not when I’m actually driving. I’m not that crazy/stupid). I check it multiple times in the evening.
And why? Why do I refresh the page so much? What am I afraid of missing out on? Because I’m guaranteed to see at least one of the following:
1. Someone checking in at Target
2. A picture of someone’s meal
3. A vague status update meant for one person only, leaving the rest of the audience confused/intrigued
4. A picture comparing Obama to Hitler (if you live in Texas)
5. Disparaging and idiotic memes against Muslims (unfortunately, not just from Texans)
6. Multiple pictures of someone’s cat (since I have to stop myself from uploading ten pictures of Apollo a day, I understand this one)
7. An alcoholic beverage someone is about to consume
8. 10 memes in a row that my brother reposts (I wish I were exaggerating. If Patrick weren’t my brother, his status updates would have been blocked a long time ago)
9. Chain letter memes so stupid that I can hardly understand how people repost them in all seriousness (“THERE ARE FIVE TUESDAYS IN OCTOBER ONCE EVERY TRILLION YEARS. IF YOU REPOST THIS, A MILLION DOLLARS WILL FALL FROM YOUR CEILING IN 30 MINUTES.”)
10. #Egregious #abuse #of #hashtags. #This #isn’t #Twitter.
The more I thought about it, the less I wanted to be part of this cycle. I didn’t want to be mad at people because of a stupid social networking site. I didn’t want to annoy everyone with a million pictures of my puppy. And most importantly, I don’t want to waste time looking at meaningless updates when I could be living my real life now, more efficiently and with more peace of mind.
There was a great quote from Tiny Buddha last week about how you should strive to find your peace of mind daily (this is something I’d like to elaborate on in a future post). Well, Facebook sure isn’t helping me find mine.
So I’m trying an experiment. I’m going to check in Facebook only once a day, in the evening. That’s it. I’m going to post only when necessary and I’m not going to make Facebook a part of my routine any longer. I don’t want to be plugged in constantly. I don’t want to be part of that machine any more.
Now, if only I could stop checking Reddit.
