Dear friends,
Some of you may have wondered why I’m leaving Facebook.
It took me a while to articulate the reasons, but this is why:
1) I am tired of feeling slightly jealous.
2) I don’t like not being able to control what I see on my wall.
3) I am tired of too much information
4) I don’t like Facebook’s encroachment on my real life
1) Some of you lead incredibly amazing lives, and I’m happy for those of you who do. What happened is that since so many of you have incredible lives, my brain stopped processing each of you as individuals and lumped you into a group. Unconsciously, you became an abstraction- albeit one of a person leading an incredible life.
Listen, I like you people with incredible lives, I really do. And I want to keep liking you, so the best thing I can do is to turn off that abstraction by leaving Facebook. I look forward to the stories we can share in person.
2) I’ll be blunt. I really really don’t care if you’re now friends with someone, or if you joined such and such group, or if you like something. Again, this isn’t personal. If you told me in person, I would go, “Oh, really? That’s cool! You know it reminds me of…” or some such. But there are over 600 of you doing the same thing, so it’s not just you. It’s 600 of you.
3) I think this point ties up the previous two points. What I look at is information on Facebook. I see 600 “avatars” of you, each doing the same thing. You all have become a mass to me, one with familiar names and faces. Because there’s no room in my life for a mass of people, I need to collectively shut you off. Remember though, that individually, I love you all.
4) I hate thinking that something would make a good wall post or that this would make a good profile picture. Nothing sucks more than being on vacation somewhere in the rainforest trying to get away from it all, and thinking about posting something to Facebook.
I think that I’m lucky to have been connected to you through Facebook, but now I realize that Facebook is in some way, dangerous. We’ve accepted its presence in our lives without question, and we’ve changed our habits to accommodate it, and not the other way around. I think I now understand celebrities who fight to live their lives away from everyone’s prying eyes. The only difference is that with Facebook, we willingly become celebrities of our own familiar audiences and give up our privacy as a result.
If any of these reasons don’t work for you, try this one: I’m keeping it simple, peeps. Facebook doesn’t make it simple for me because I’m a complicated man, and no one understands me but my women. ;)
Peace
