Hey guys,
I hope you had a fantastic week!
So, following on from my dramatic 'quarter-life crisis' post, last week, I decided to give Facebook up cold turkey for 7 days.
Why?
Well, I realised I was spending more time online, eyeing other people's posts, comparing lives, and distracting myself, than I was thinking about my own life, my own goals and my own dreams. Which doesn't make much sense right? I still have a lot I want to figure out, a lot of soul-searching I want to do, and clicking through an acquaintance's dinner photos for an hour totally doesn't make a lot of sense.
Facebook is such a strange addictive being - it preys on our deepest insecurities and our deepest desires - that yin-yang relationship between the fear of not being good enough, and the deep yearning to be heard, to have a voice. It creates celebrities out of each of us, plants us in a bubble of self-obsession and provides a platform for incessant comparison and external validation, that in the long-term surely cannot be healthy.
Now don't get me wrong - social media has done a lot of good as well. But there comes a point when the line fades.
Everything we post up on social media is posted up with the knowledge that it will be judged by almost everyone you know. Which then means most of what we see being presented to us - perfect selfies, excited announcements, cool hashtags - are an airbrushed version of each person's reality. An attempt to reaffirm one's success in the eyes of society. I know this because I frequently am guilty of it.
And yet we forget the fact that everything see is 'airbrushed' when we scan our social media every hour - subconsciously the messages we are being sent as we click through our newsfeed are: everyone else is doing so well, why am I not?
I don't know if everyone feels this way, but I was definitely reaching the point where I needed a break from all the noise, and needed to retreat into my own world and figure things out.
So I didn't log into Facebook for 7-8 days. And here's what I noticed:
1) I didn't know what to do in the evenings if I needed to distract myself. So I was forced to focus and get my work done - by day 3, I was super efficient and super productive.
2) I wasn't bothered by information overload, so my mind felt a lot more relaxed.
3) I had eliminated a key aggravator of 'comparison syndrome' - I didn't feel the need to compare myself to all 900 of my FB friends because I no longer knew what all 900 people were doing. I kept in touch with close friends via email and Skype chat and that was just enough.
4) I was less bothered by ridiculous feelings of inadequacy if my profile picture got less likes than my friends (yes, we've all been there). Life suddenly felt a lot more calm, a lot less competitive and just a lot more simple.
5) I could more clearly assess me and my life for what it was, and not for what it was relative to others. This is so key and so important.
So those were the pros. The only real 'con' I noticed, was that I found it hard to stay in contact with people in general, without using Facebook chat. A week later, I felt as though I had fallen off the planet and I had no idea what was happening with people I cared about - because emails got missed or time differences came in the way.
I also really missed making statements through my status updates - they were cool.
This led me to conclude that the only utility I wanted out of Facebook was:
1) The ability to contact friends I actually want to check in with, on my terms, through Facebook chat.
2) The ability to use Facebook status updates as a means to share strong beliefs and ideals that I believed would actually make a difference.
This all comes back to the point of 'being in control' - we should be in control of our consumption patterns, and our habits and lives should not be dictated to us by this crazy information-intensive mass consumerist culture that we live in. It's the same with mobile phones for instance - do we really need a new slightly-updated, but really not very different version of the iPhone every 3 months?
Anyway, I digress.
My Facebook detox was awesome. It gave me time to just be me, in the absence of a billion voices to compare with and filter through. And I feel a lot better as a result, because I managed to slowly figure out what I wanted for myself and some short-term goals. I was more in control of my thoughts and my time, and I felt relieved and relaxed.
I probably will not go on a total week-long Facebook ban again - but what I have decided to do, is to be more in control of my usage. 1 hour a day maximum. And I'm going to get my friends to use email a bit more ;). There's definitely something charming about receiving a page-long email from someone right?
So what does Facebook add to your life - and what does it take away? Is it time to re-jig the way you use it so that the tool serves you and you don't serve the tool? There's no denying that there has been a lot of good that social media does, so there maybe this is one way through which we can take the good without the bad.
As always, I'd love to know what you think!
Til' next time,
Love,
A.x
I hope you had a fantastic week!
So, following on from my dramatic 'quarter-life crisis' post, last week, I decided to give Facebook up cold turkey for 7 days.
Why?
Well, I realised I was spending more time online, eyeing other people's posts, comparing lives, and distracting myself, than I was thinking about my own life, my own goals and my own dreams. Which doesn't make much sense right? I still have a lot I want to figure out, a lot of soul-searching I want to do, and clicking through an acquaintance's dinner photos for an hour totally doesn't make a lot of sense.
Facebook is such a strange addictive being - it preys on our deepest insecurities and our deepest desires - that yin-yang relationship between the fear of not being good enough, and the deep yearning to be heard, to have a voice. It creates celebrities out of each of us, plants us in a bubble of self-obsession and provides a platform for incessant comparison and external validation, that in the long-term surely cannot be healthy.
Now don't get me wrong - social media has done a lot of good as well. But there comes a point when the line fades.
It's like society on a platter. Your circle of people watches your every move, your photos, your life events; and you stare back out at them, watching the updates flashing by.
Everything we post up on social media is posted up with the knowledge that it will be judged by almost everyone you know. Which then means most of what we see being presented to us - perfect selfies, excited announcements, cool hashtags - are an airbrushed version of each person's reality. An attempt to reaffirm one's success in the eyes of society. I know this because I frequently am guilty of it.
And yet we forget the fact that everything see is 'airbrushed' when we scan our social media every hour - subconsciously the messages we are being sent as we click through our newsfeed are: everyone else is doing so well, why am I not?
I don't know if everyone feels this way, but I was definitely reaching the point where I needed a break from all the noise, and needed to retreat into my own world and figure things out.
1) I didn't know what to do in the evenings if I needed to distract myself. So I was forced to focus and get my work done - by day 3, I was super efficient and super productive.
2) I wasn't bothered by information overload, so my mind felt a lot more relaxed.
3) I had eliminated a key aggravator of 'comparison syndrome' - I didn't feel the need to compare myself to all 900 of my FB friends because I no longer knew what all 900 people were doing. I kept in touch with close friends via email and Skype chat and that was just enough.
4) I was less bothered by ridiculous feelings of inadequacy if my profile picture got less likes than my friends (yes, we've all been there). Life suddenly felt a lot more calm, a lot less competitive and just a lot more simple.
5) I could more clearly assess me and my life for what it was, and not for what it was relative to others. This is so key and so important.
So those were the pros. The only real 'con' I noticed, was that I found it hard to stay in contact with people in general, without using Facebook chat. A week later, I felt as though I had fallen off the planet and I had no idea what was happening with people I cared about - because emails got missed or time differences came in the way.
I also really missed making statements through my status updates - they were cool.
This led me to conclude that the only utility I wanted out of Facebook was:
1) The ability to contact friends I actually want to check in with, on my terms, through Facebook chat.
2) The ability to use Facebook status updates as a means to share strong beliefs and ideals that I believed would actually make a difference.
This all comes back to the point of 'being in control' - we should be in control of our consumption patterns, and our habits and lives should not be dictated to us by this crazy information-intensive mass consumerist culture that we live in. It's the same with mobile phones for instance - do we really need a new slightly-updated, but really not very different version of the iPhone every 3 months?
Anyway, I digress.
My Facebook detox was awesome. It gave me time to just be me, in the absence of a billion voices to compare with and filter through. And I feel a lot better as a result, because I managed to slowly figure out what I wanted for myself and some short-term goals. I was more in control of my thoughts and my time, and I felt relieved and relaxed.
I probably will not go on a total week-long Facebook ban again - but what I have decided to do, is to be more in control of my usage. 1 hour a day maximum. And I'm going to get my friends to use email a bit more ;). There's definitely something charming about receiving a page-long email from someone right?
So what does Facebook add to your life - and what does it take away? Is it time to re-jig the way you use it so that the tool serves you and you don't serve the tool? There's no denying that there has been a lot of good that social media does, so there maybe this is one way through which we can take the good without the bad.
As always, I'd love to know what you think!
Til' next time,
Love,
A.x
