No Thanks, I'm Trying to Quit

Lately, I've been strongly considering quitting things that I spend time on that don't make me smarter/happier/feel accomplished/prettier/more interesting/richer. The big one is Facebook. The little guys are 4chan, anything that facilitates my "e-stalking" anyone, and anything having to do with celebrities, video games, and internet memes. They don't contribute to my life. In the picture I hold in my head of the woman I want to be, those things just aren't there.

Yanked from The Joy of Tech webcomic.

I can tell you with absolute certainty that my ability to flip between tabs, talk to a dozen people at once, look up what every acquaintance I've ever had, and be informed of every internet fad at a moment's notice has pushed me in the opposite of my goals. I'm less socially adept than I want to, should, and used to be. I'm less patient. I judge too easily, and based on too little information. Too much real estate of my mind is inhabited by useless crap that was born and will die on the internet, and will never matter to anyone in the real world.

I'm making progress in my life. Every day has victories and setbacks, but I'm proud of what I'm doing to get where I want to be. I'm proud that I can work through the tears and know that yes, it sucks, and yes, I'm going to do it anyway. I want to keep that ball rolling. I don't want to slip into complacency and laziness and anxiety over things that are ultimately trivial. I don't want to look back on my life and the most memorable things I see to be advertisements, Farmville, the top ten list of top ten lists, lolcats, and status updates.

I don't strongly identify with a lot of the common complaints against Facebook and other social networking sites. A refrain I hear a lot about Facebook and Twitter is that people are boring others by over-sharing, more commonly expressed as, "no one cares what you had for lunch." Well, I kind of do. I care about what you read and learned, what you saw and thought, what you ate and where you went. It's just that, in a flood of all of this unconnected information, it gets lost. In a conversation, it matters. Not just what you ate, but how you felt about it and if I should eat it and if you want to learn how to make it or if you like the restaurant so much that you wouldn't dream of ruining the magic by attempting to cook things from there. Another common complaint is about Facebook's privacy policy, which they say is horrible and too confusing to the average user. It's possible that I'm too ignorant to know just how confused I am, but I don't think I actually have a problem with Facebook's privacy now that I've taken the time to amp my privacy settings way up and accept next to no applications. I do think I had too many pages "liked," which (rather obnoxiously) allows those pages' maintainers to look at my profile, but unliking them today should clear that right up.

My big problems with Facebook are that it's a time suck, it tethers me to people I don't really know and isn't that great a medium to learn more about them the most superficial things, I have an addictive personality that really goes crazy for the constant and ever-changing updates, I feel bad having to friend, unfriend, block, or ignore people on the site because I know they might take it personally, and a lot of what's posted on there either bores or annoys me. I have no doubt that it's a privacy nightmare, but that's not my reason for quitting. Sure, it's a contributor to the greater problem of information overload, but that's not the biggest thing to me. It's the personal reasons that really get to me. I guess I just needed to realize that you didn't have to be a smug tech journalist whining through your newly whitened teeth (thanks, Google AdSense!) about the great Satan, Mark Zuckerberg, to be sick of what Facebook does to your life.



Thanks to Megumi for making me aware of this video.

With that said, I haven't quit yet. I've updated my LeechBlock settings to limit my time on Facebook, along with 4chan, Twitter, etsy, Encyclopedia Dramatica, and other sites. I'm going to take the week to post a few things to my news feed about why it's a good idea to quit Facebook, download all my photos from the site, and message friends from there to let them know other ways to contact me. And in a week I plan to quit. To delete my account. To make sure not to go back there or click any buttons on any websites to "like" or "share" things, because ANY activity, even accidental, in the two weeks following your attempt at deletion, will cause Facebook to re-activate your account. I'm not planning on letting that happen to me.