Well, it all started when I saw a link on Yahoo! (which I browse through everyday) about a guy who deleted his Facebook and actually withdrew himself from the world of technology (no cell phone, internet, tv). You can read the story here. I found his story to be somewhat out of the ordinary for I guess a "normal" person of our society today. How could you go 3 months without technology, let alone just Facebook? The guy had so much more time for meaningful things in life and had time that was accounted for, and I was envious.
Well I gave myself a pep-talk and decided, "I could go without Facebook forever!" I thought it would be in my best interest as well, considering that I spend hours a day on it. Most of which are spent at work because it gets so boring at my desk job in the evenings. I'm sure as well, everyone's read the negative-Nancy comments on their news feed, quotes/song lyrics, or seen repeated pictures of that one attention whore who keeps posting phone pictures of herself. I'm definitely sick of that I thought, and sick of being that person who adds someone just because we have 20 mutual friends so I must know them. I found myself going through a list of love/hate reasons to quit the site. I came to the conclusion that it had made me way more insecure than before I had started using it. Between seeing girls with bigger boobs, darker skin, a nice car, etc, my self esteem was going to an all time low!
So what was stopping me before? It all seemed to come down to the fact that I didn't want to lose the pictures and videos I had spent so much time uploading. Then I figured out how to download a copy of all my files (including messages, comments, friends) and decided now was the time to go through with the deletion (especially if I ever wanted to spend time on things more productive). By the way, Facebook makes it extremely annoying to do this process, it is very lengthy. So I copied all these files to a disk (after having to download a CD burning program.) and went through with the deletion. To my surprise a page popped up saying so and so will miss you if you go! Which were basically people that I hadn't talked to. Man, way to put me through a guilt trip there fb!
I get home that night from my boring timeshare desk job and my boyfriends immediately thinks I'm nuts. He goes on and on about how my family is on there and how I wont be able to keep in contact with anybody. I reassured him that it was for the greater good for myself, I'll have my quality time with him, etc. It felt good not checking my Facebook on my way home from work either, or checking it again when I got home. Wow, that makes me sound like an addict! That night happened to be Superbowl Sunday and of course people where asking if I saw this and that on Facebook, or asking why I deleted it. Half of them seemed shocked and the other half looked as if "oh she'll come back". I was very confident in my decisions to delete it and happy I was not part of the fb bandwagon anymore. The night went on and I never even picked up my phone. No one wants to be that guy at a party who's face is balls deep in his own phone, surrounded by friends. I was pretty proud of myself when I went home. I had gone a whole day without going on it.
The next day I was off of work and actually was very productive between cleaning, working out, studying and playing with my dog outside. It was a walk in the park it seemed like. Well Tuesday comes around and I go to log into my Spotify account, which then says I need to log in through Facebook. Then I realized, "Shit I have almost everything linked though my Facebook log in!" I'm also an avid Tosh.0 Blog fan, and when it came to logging into that, same problem. So I came to the conclusion, make new accounts for all of these websites/apps that I use linked through Facebook, or just log into the damn thing. Well my hypocritical side took over, and I was once again sucked into the black hole. This time though I thought, I'm going to have way more self control and not be taken in by all the jealousies, drama, and insecurities the site brings. Also, being that I'm majoring in CIT, I'm always going to be around technology, so I may as well keep it for networking. So I started first by deleting a huge chunk of the 550 friends I had, which was anything but easy! By that I mean it was a bitch to go through and click each profile and delete, versus the easier way of doing things with the old Facebook layout (I have timeline). So I weed through all these people and delete people whom have never talked to me in three years, or at all. My remaining number is 281. Wow. It felt good that I cut out all of the creepy people I knew that just added me to surf through my pictures. I also went ahead and did an entire overhaul on my profile and hid more things.
Well, I didn't go through with the whole deletion completely, but I have cut down on my time on there about 75% (no joke) just by taking all the bull crap off and the temptations of browsing through random people's albums. I've also decided to invest my time into something more "me". That's why I started this blog here, 1 day after my reactivation, to not share all of my inner thoughts and funny pictures on there and share them to people that will care. I will though keep praying that one day, just one day everyone will convert to Google+. But only the cool people, el oh el.
