On A Personal Note...

Confession of a twenty-something guy about to graduate college: I’m addicted to Facebook. As much as I hate to the say that, it’s true. The ruler of social media has sucked more time out of my life than I care to admit, and I’ve finally realized that it’s time to make a change. Today - as I write this - is the first day I have logged out of Facebook in months. I closed the tab on my browser. I deleted the app from my Smartphone. And goddamn does it feel liberating. Cold Turkey isn’t always easy though, as the real test of my will power and resistance still awaits me.

What brought about this sudden change in lifestyle you may ask? Well, a few weeks ago I was dumped. My long-term relationship with a girl I’ve known for ten years ended abruptly. I was crushed. Ok, enough of the sob story… the silver lining here is that I discovered a dangerous addiction that I am now on the way to remedying. Our relationship was long-distance – we’re both at different universities, one East and one West – so communication was always a little tricky. I found myself constantly checking up on her through social media; looking at pictures, seeing what she was up to, reading what her friends had to say. In a way, I was trying to replace a real relationship with an online one, especially post break up. I couldn’t go an hour without checking her page. It had to stop.

On top of that, I fell back on my own Facebook existence to weather the storm. For an entire week, I posted as much content as I could. I checked in everywhere I went, tagging all of my friends with me. I posted pictures of me out having a good time, pretending like everything was fine. I wanted her to see that I was moving on.

After thinking about this experience for a while now, I realize how fake it is. It’s been said a million times, but Social Media really is destroying our potential to interact in personal and meaningful ways. If Facebook did not exist now, I wouldn’t have drawn out my break up so long. It would have been harder at first, but at least it would have been final. Instead, I’ve been trying to hold on to the good memories through her virtual existence. And myself? I’m not really back to normal and having a great time yet, but my Facebook page says otherwise. What was I thinking?

This is only a single example of how relationships do not translate evenly across the physical and digital worlds. My relationship at least had a partially physical aspect. Now think about all the connections through social media that don’t. They are often meaningless, falsely represented images of what’s real, making social media far less effective when utilizing its networks for causes beyond personal communication.

Pardon my rant, but I had to get that out.