I guess you could call me a recovering addict. It’s been five months since I last logged onto my Facebook profile. Well, maybe saying I was addicted to Facebook is a bit of an overstatement, but like many of my peers, I spent considerable amounts of time on the social networking site.
This is about how I jumped off of the bandwagon that is Facebook.
I joined Facebook right before my senior year of high school. My family and friends had been constantly urging me to join the social networking site so that I could stay connected to them. After a resisting for the longest time, I finally caved in and made a Facebook profile.
At first, I couldn’t believe how amazing it was to friend people from years and years past who lived thousands of miles away. I could read their walls and scroll through their (often hundreds) of pictures to catch up with what they were up to after all this time without communication. The information—or maybe gossip?—I learned about people ranged from a change in my cousin’s relationship status to an update about two of my friends having a chai latte at a local coffee shop. Although I posted relatively few pictures and status updates on Facebook, I consciously realized that what I did post were only things that I wanted other people to see. My profile was a mere façade, carefully constructed to have control over how others perceived me.
As expected, Facebook became my mode of procrastination. Any time I was on the Internet, I would compulsively log onto Facebook, and when I was bored, I would check my news feed. Eventually, I realized how much of my time was wasted… for what? Relationships with people didn’t become stronger. I was not necessarily any closer to people just because they were my “friends” on Facebook. This was the point when being on Facebook wasn’t worth it anymore. Coupled with the knowledge that it was time consuming and unproductive, I quit Facebook—a decision made without regrets.
Neither do I regret spending a year of my life on Facebook. If there was anything I learned from my experience, it was about the nature of friendships. First of all, people in your life come and go. Right before starting high school, I moved away from everything and everybody I had ever known. Now that I am five years removed from that experience, there are few people from my hometown that I occasionally talk to (and talking does not consist of posting “happy birthday” on their Facebook wall every year). People drift apart, given time and space, and not all relationships are meant to last forever; unfortunately, such is the nature of life.
Secondly, true friends are few and far in between; I can count on one hand the number of friends that I would trust with anything. These are friendships that will probably last a lifetime.
And lastly, such friendships are not easy to maintain. Telling a friend what’s going on in my life is infinitely better than blabbing out my feelings to hundreds of random “friends” on Facebook. Friendship is all about spending time doing fun things and making memories. It’s about sitting outside underneath a patio umbrella in 100-degree weather, drinking raspberry iced tea and talking about anything and everything. It’s about trying a new brownie recipe, not having it turn out so well, but eating it anyway. More importantly, friendship is about trust and support. It’s about being a shoulder to cry on—and about trusting a friend enough to cry on her shoulder. These people are not the static profiles listed as “friends” on Facebook but, rather, are true friends who are actively involved in your life.