If you were on my Facebook wall right now, you’d see nothing on there.
No recent status updates or comments. Just a blank wall you’d have to scroll down a bit to see the latest post.
You wouldn’t even be able to post a new status on my wall even if you tried.
I made the conscious decision over a year ago to disable new posts from showing up on my wall. My latest personal update was on June 16, 2013, inviting my friends to slap me for $8/hour.
I installed Snapchat a few months ago out of curiosity and it was awesome. I was able to keep in touch with my friends in a fun way that’s somehow more personal than a Facebook message or a text. Sort of just one step down from actually hanging out in person.
But after only a month or two, I became conscious of the fact that I often had the urge to post something new with the sole intent being to show off what I was doing at the time.
It was an easy way of getting an endorphin rush by (not-so) subtly boasting.
This took me out of the moment of what I was doing and made the moments feel a bit less special. Instead of doing something for the sake of doing it, it became more about documenting the moment and seeing how many people viewed my snaps.
The same thing applied to Facebook. How many Likes and comments did my status get? How do I frame this status update to make me look as cool as possible?
Social media became a convenient button for endorphin rushes and ego boosts. One of my first thoughts when I booked my plane ticket back to Asia (aside from documenting that too), was “Sweet, think of all the exotic snaps I’d be able to take over there.”)
On the other side of the coin, if I was bored and had nothing going on that day, I’d open up Snapchat (or Facebook) to see what everyone was up to.
Now instead of showing off and getting an ego boost, I was comparing what I happened to be doing (or not doing) at that point to what someone else had going on.
It stopped being fun. It stopped being about keeping in touch with my friends and being silly and instead became a way to bolster my ego or beat myself up.
And what scared me most was how habitual it had become. My mood was on the verge of becoming reliant on what was going on in the world of social media.
So I had to remove the addictions from my life and limit the easiness of a cheap ego boost.
There’s nothing wrong with being active on social media in most cases. I just happened to have been using them for the wrong reasons.
The marginal downsides of being active on Facebook and Snapchat daily outweighed any potential benefits, so I had to cut them out.
Vincent, those are my thoughts and words. You must have stolen them. 🙂
You know I am kidding, but that’s exactly how I feel. I seem to get on Twitter or Facebook for just a few minutes, and before I realize one or two hours are lost. Meanwhile, my book suffers because I don’t give it the time it needs.
The more I try to catch up the more time I waste.
You inspired me to get off social media and get to work.
Thank you!
Be well and blessed!
I had literally just closed the Facebook tab before jumping on here! And I didn’t even do anything important on there. 😛
Vincent! I’m glad you bought this up. I’m not using Facebook or any other social media for past 2years, I realised that I wasted my time more than I had. Plus the fact that I think is a tragedy is we are more concerned in uploading status and pictures while doing anything instead of feeling the moment, the day I deactivated my social networks I started to live for myself and enjoying my moments more. And now I hang out with my friends in a real manner which is actually more fun.
Awesome, Jamiee! I had my FB account disabled for almost a year at some point, but now I keep it open because my business is on it and to occasionally keep in touch with people. There are other ways to accomplish the latter, though. Namely, Viber, Whatsapp, Skype, etc.
I don’t really post on facebook and rarely log in, not sure why I have it really.
The same can be send for the internet in general. It is very difficult to stay focused on a particular task online when there are so many other distractions! Before you know it you’ve clicked on 4 links and you are now viewing a topic totally unrelated to what you started doing 🙁
I’m always trying to reign myself in.
Haha, Reddit is my distraction for getting into a mess of random links.
Really useful article ,why I thought same . Face book and other social sites inspire less and waste our precious time more even they have spoiled relationships . I will close my account too . It is really cool to stay in touch with friends but if we do not keep in touch ,those very sincere friends walk away like we did something very wrong .
Few! Sometimes I really want to remove all social media such as facebook, twitter,.. but I can not. i need it to connect and work.