The thing with Facebook
Photo by Raphael Lucena/ Source here
I want to delete my account. My personal one, that is. I have another one I use for my business. That I shall keep; it’s for marketing purposes.
The last two weeks we’ve been on vacation, all three of us – my husband & our little daughter & I, and given the surroundings and context of the mountain village we lived in for the whole period, I barely could log on to my facebook account. Neither did I wished to stay online, as our days in the offline world, were much, much more interesting, exciting and well…real!
The thing with facebook is that it’s just a free tool within our reach. Not a magic stick and certainly not a cure for loneliness. Or a magic formula for upgrading and improving our lives.
What we do with it, is our personal choice. And it seems that the unanimous decision of our modern society is to use it to edit, copy, paste, filter, adjust, delete, share and like our personalities. Rarely do I hear people learning something via social media. Except for maybe learning how to fake it. Fake everything: our lives, our personalities, our interests…even our meals. On facebook everything seems superlative, excellent, first-class; it seems like we’re all having the times of our lives, when in fact we are only lonelier and a bit more lunatic.
We have tons of online friends, but only a few or none, to call at 4 a.m. when our car breaks down. We can’t remember our closest friend’s birth date, but we are happy to send virtual flower bouquets to complete strangers on their birthdays. And the list can go on and on.
A couple of nights ago, while scrolling down on my mobile phone, I found this short documentary and it really hit home.
“I share, therefore I am”…that seems to be the motto and disease of our generation. Kind of sad, isn’t it? All these picture perfect smiles, instant happiness moments, decadent meals, high-end brands and jet-set lives. All that glitter, all those filters and all that pretending…it’s beyond sad, it’s humiliating and abusive.
So, dear facebook, it’s not you…it’s me. It’s us and our ever-growing egos. That’s why, I decided to put an end to our story.
What about you, dear friends? What’s your opinion on social media and the movie-like online life?
xx,
Clover
