Why I Quit Facebook

When Facebook first really started to take shape as a company, several friends o f mine from my former employer went to go work for them. This is how I found ou t about the site: "Hey, I started a new job at this new site. Check it out and t ell me what you think." So because of this, I was a pretty early adopter. I didn't really get what it was good for and I sort of ignored it for a while. But then it started to reach critical mass and everyone I had ever met in my lif e started to show up and there was a mass flurry of mutual friending. I got bac k in touch with people I really liked but had lost touch with over the years. I accepted a few friend requests from people I only knew in grade school. At t his time people were lamenting the word "friend" and I thought getting annoyed o ver the semantics of the word was a bit pointless. So the next thing that happened, of course, is that my newsfeed became crammed w ith updates of people I didn't know anymore. Or became crammed with updates of people I knew pretty well , but who updated too often, or became crammed with "l ikes" from people who again, I am sure were perfectly nice, but were otherwise n ot in my daily life at all and never were. I became annoyed seeing the constant repetition of " so and so likes your status update" when otherwise so and so wa sn't in my life at all. I didn't want so and so in my face all the time. I decided to preserve my network and didn't unfriend anyone who wasn't an actual friend. I kept everyone. But I did block a lot of people from my newsfeed. My g oal was to reclaim quality control over what I was seeing in my feed. My litmu s test was simple: "Does seeing this person's updates make my happy or unhappy?" Happy, they stayed. Unhappy, they were blocked. My decision had nothing to d o with how well I knew the person or not. Did their updates make me happy or no t happy? Next I connected my twitter account to my facebook account so that my twitter up dates would feed into my facebook updates. But I hardly used twitter simply beca use I had already friended everyone I wanted to be networked with and didn't wan t to go through the process again. I also didn't like twitter for all the people I didn't know who could follow me. That felt unsettling and spammy. Next I started "liking" the pages of news and other media in an attempt to make my newsfeed an actual newsfeed. That worked ok. And so I've been coasting along like this for quite some time, being a vocal fan of this incredible social networking site. And still, despite my proactiveness in trying to derive happiness from Facebook, it doesn't make me happy. Not for the content, but for the fact that it has become a genuine habit--a bad habit. I check it compulsively, all day long like taking a breath or going for a quick m ental stretch. But it doesn't refresh me. It just distracts me and robs me of my abilty to concentrate for more than 5 minutes in a row. But we've all been trai ned to become multitaskers right? Yeah, that's bullshit. I bought an i-pad and the problem became worse. I said a while ago that I want t echnology to be efficient enought help me spend more time looking up and out, no t down and in. The i-pad is incredibly efficent at helping you look down and in all the time. I want to live in a three dimensional world and I am having troub le getting back there.

But Facebook's latest redesign has helped me break free. The updates and real ti me feed send my brain in overdrive. And it is not that I don't want people seei ng every little thing I do on the site. I'm not all that protective of my privac y. The problem is I don't care to see every little thing everyone else is doing . I literally do not care .I do not want to see a constant feed of someone's pla ylist on spotify. I feel like I am being forced to invade someone else's privacy , whether they care or not. I don't want to see it and I am not going to spend anymore time on Facebook trying to block out what it shows me that makes me unha ppy. So I quit Facebook. And after even just two days, it feels really, really good. And I'm not going to be a nazi about it. If someone wants to show me something of course I will go look. Maybe I will still upload my photos there, I'm not sur e. But I quit. I've stopped using it. The people from my past it brought back i nto my life that I want to keep I still get to keep. But I won't see their upda tes unless they tweet them. I quit. And now I'm going to go sit in my garden and look up and out.

(P.S. my twitter handle is @bethmassa)