It takes some serious shit to make us go as far as removing Facebook from our lives. I personally just devoted a full twenty minutes hovering over the 'deactivate' button, questioning my decision. In doing so, it feels like you're going to lose contact with the entire world and perhaps your social
It's not breaking news that Facebook is a massive waste of time, and the classic 'I hate Facebook' rant is one that is seen on an almost weekly basis, right before the speaker caves in and re-activates (which I admit, I will resentfully do at some point) but why? In deactivating we are literally only temporarily removing Facebook, its easy because all we have to do is type in our user name and password and that's it, we're once again forcefully divulged into other peoples lives.
It's natural that people are curious about the lives of others. Entire companies rely on gossip to maintain their income. Magazines write entire articles about celebrities that have had a bit of a wardrobe malfunction and newspapers infamously listen to private phone calls then broadcast them to the world in the form of "news." But where is the line between an invasion of privacy and outrightly putting your life out there for the entire world to see. Discretion is clearly a thing of the past, pictures of people having sex pop up on an almost hourly basis in the form of 'after-sex selfies' and it has become something that people are just okay with. It becomes worse by the fact that we don't even need a computer to access Facebook any more. We occupy all of our time with it, it's on our phones, our tablets and our laptops. Even when the app is being painfully slow we wait for it to load. We actually sit and wait to see what pointless shit is happening to irrelevant people in our lives.
One of the worst things is that it can actually affect our opinions of ourselves. If we upload a picture that doesn't get any likes it feels like the cyber universe is calling you fugly. If your boyfriend deletes all of the pictures of you and him after you break up its like someone has kicked you in the face. It's fundamentally abnormal to be so involved in things that should be done in private. Imagine a world where you couldn't take a snap of yourself and put it on the internet for the approval of others. What would you do instead? Take a picture, get it developed then walk around the street asking people to say if they like it or not? If you were going through a break up and you couldn't incessently stalk your ex's Facebook page to see what they were doing what would you do? Would you ring and demand to see every single picture that has been taken of them since you broke up? No, you would drown your sorrows in vodka and watch Bridget Jones on repeat like you should.
The point is, that in a moment of self-realisation I have seen that Facebook (and all other social networking sites for that matter, I just particularly loathe Facebook) is toxic. Once you've seen something that you didn't want to, you can't unsee it. You cannot live your social life vicariously through Facebook. It gives a false sense of popularity or unpopularity through the volume of 'friends' that you have. I am about 98% sure that I will be eating my words in a matter of days when I eventually re-activate my account, but for now I say: If you ever find yourself hovering over the deactivate button, do it, you're there for a reason (and I doubt you'll miss much.)
