Totally Rad: The Facebook Issue

Thanks to my dear friend Marie, I was introduced to the "Radical Life" blog. The Radical Life is thought-provoking, to say the least, and challenging. I highly recommend checking it out, it might just change your life, or at least awaken it. This all came about because my friend decided she was finally pulling the plug on her Facebook account. If you'd like to read about her thoughts on that, click here. But in the RL blog, he wrote about reasons to quit Facebook and objections to doing that. In short, it's not that Facebook is terrible, it's just that there are so many better ways to spend your time (but that really doesn't do it justice, I encourage you to just read the whole thing lol.)

This is not a completely new idea. I know that Facebook isn't a productive way to spend my time. And to some people, who haven't had FB their whole adult life or who aren't what I would call "power users", this all may seem quite obvious. Because it is, when you really think about it. But for those of us who have had Facebook all through college, and surely spent countless hours dodging our studies with it, it is still easy to get sucked in. It is so easy and so accepted to spend an hour (plus more...) scrolling through Facebook every day.

Thanks to all of those blog posts, I too have been doing a LOT of thinking and analyzing lately in regards to how I spend my time, aka life. But in addition to how much time we spend on Facebook, he also took a critical look at what we all do on FB. There were two points that really hit home for me in the original Radical Life post; they go hand in hand actually.

One was the observation of how few intimate moments we have these days. How true, yes, how true, said the Sour Kangaroo. Whether your time is interrupted by a text message or you spend more time playing with your phone than talking with your spouse or kids, that alone is a huge distraction and killer of intimate moments. But the bigger point is to think about just how much STUFF we all share online. How many times do people post photos of their babies onto Facebook practically minutes after they cut the umbilical cord? Or how often do people share photos of their spouse, because they're on a romantic dinner date and want to tell you about it? I would not consider myself an "oversharer" by any means, but the takeaway to me is that some stuff (okay, a LOT of stuff) just doesn't need to be shared. Relish in the moment, live in the now, take it all in! Don't ruin it by "Wait-hold-on-I-wanna-take-a-picture-of-you!" or thinking about how you should show this to your friends online. Some things should be left shared only by the people in the room.

The other part to this is we start crafting posts in our heads before or as things are happening; hoping our carefully crafted post will gain Likes and Comments. He called it "Life through a lens" and we are "reporting our lives instead of living them." I'd be lying if I didn't say I've fallen victim to this sometimes. And it is really great to realize it so I can work on cutting it out.

I think that part really resonated with me because my job is social media. I carefully craft posts in hopes that, as a business, we will get our posts in front of eyes. Because eyes, essentially, can equal revenue from the website. So thinking about what to post, what not to post, how to word it, what not to say is engrained in me. But I think there is a way to separate my social media obsession that I'm required to have to do my job from my personal life's social media usage. It's difficult, but I think it's possible. My husband has this incredible ability that when he walks out the door at the end of the work day, he is no longer working and it is far from his mind. I think the same thing is achievable for me. Once I'm off work, I don't need to and shouldn't think about what I should post to my Facebook.

Because the big question that this entire mess of thoughts and blog posts is: WHY DO WE DO THIS?!

I mean, seriously!? Why in the world do we feel like we have to share so much with our "friends"? I wonder if it has something to do with a longing to be appreciated, noticed, valued, etc. We want people to like us, we want people to pay attention to us once in a while, and with Facebook it's so easy. Consider telling your friend something. He/She is one person. You'll get a response from one person. But in telling Facebook, you've just told (probably) hundreds, and if ten people respond in some way, than woo hoo! I don't know, maybe that's not it, I haven't figured that one out yet. But still, that one personal response is way better than ten empty, lifeless Likes on Facebook.

Without trying to make it too complicated though, I wonder if the big reason we do this stuff is that it is just so darn easy and people are getting lazy. It's easy to "keep in touch with people" versus calling them up and actually talking to them. And I'm certainly guilty of that too.

In closing, if anyone's still reading this, all of this has made me do some reevaluation that I'm sure I will write about some more some other time. I am by no means perfect, and I am struggling. But I'm a little less quick to post things to Facebook the past couple weeks. Sometimes I even write something up then delete the whole thing because I ask myself "Why am I doing this?" I'm also working really hard not to visit Facebook on my phone very much, or on the computer. I deleted the Facebook bookmark off my browser so it's not staring me in the face all the time. I'm working on putting down the lens and just enjoying the moment. Because like the people I mentioned at the very beginning of this have said: there are SO many more awesome people and things you can spend your time with.

Cheers.