Why I Deactivated My Facebook Account

I deactivated my Facebook account last night. It's not the first time I've done it. It's always temporary. Sometimes I go just days, sometimes weeks before reactivating it. I may go months this time, maybe I'll permanently deactivate it. Wait, I'm not sure if I'm ready for that big step yet. But let me break down what Facebook has done to my life, and I'm sure many of you can relate. Before Facebook, people just went about their lives. They kept contact with a few friends from high school maybe, from college perhaps and a few of their current acquaintances: co-workers, friends of the family, etc. More than likely you would have lost contact with most of the people from your past. They went about their lives, you went about yours. Maybe on occasion you may have stopped to wonder: whatever happened to so-and so? And then you move on. If you are compelled to do so and you are friends with someone who is still in contact with them, you may ask how they're doing. But generally you move along with your own life. Step by step, day by day. Then came Facebook. You made an account and added a photo of yourself thinking of all the people from your past who may be seeing it. You find the best-looking picture of you. The one of you on a beach in Brazil (look how lucky I am to have traveled so far), the one where you have on something that brings out your eyes and shows off your figure for all the guys in the past who overlooked you and of course to make other girls jealous. You add the prestigious school you went to. You put down that you're "in a relationship" and daydream about the moment when you can change that status to engaged or married for the all the world to see. Old acquaintances, friends, lovers, enemies alike all popped up out of the woodwork. You felt the need to "friend" all those people. Their faces would pop up on the left side of the screen under "People You May Know" and with one click you could friend them and you did. You would feel a feeling a satisfaction, one more notch on your friend-count. Just one of the many ways to judge your own self worth... and others. Let's see if I can get up to 200 friends like Mike. Oh wow, John has 550 friends, he must be popular and well-liked. You friend your friends. You friend your enemies. Because you want them to see how far you've come, how hot you look, how cute your kids are, that someone loved you enough to marry you, that you started your own company, etc. Just a little boost for your ego. Until you find yourself "cyber-stalking" other people. (Don't act like you don't do it). You log into Facebook 10x a day to read other people's status updates. You realize that each time you log in and someone is bragging about how awesome their life is and how lucky they are, posting photos of their $50,000 wedding or their lavish vacation and you start to wonder what's up with your own life. Feelings of inadequacy start to creep in. And you feel inadequate for feeling inadequate. After all, it's just a silly social networking website. The obsession continues. A sting of envy to find out that your ex-best friend just got engaged and you're still single. You find yourself caring so much about the lives of people you never speak to... your "friends". Being a relatively self-aware person, I was seeing these patterns in myself. This need for validation from fake virtual "friends"...people who would not show up to my funeral if I died (but would maybe gossip to other people about it and secretly feel better about their own lives because, well, better me than them). Cynical? Maybe. True? Most likely. I decided to deactivate my account because I was spending more time focused on other people's lives than my own. And although I am a very private person, I was feeling the urge to engage in the bragging and desperate seeking of validation that people tend to do on Facebook. I was tempted to brag about how great my life is, to post pictures of my lavish vacation and of the flowers my boyfriend bought me today with the caption : "I'm the luckiest girl in the world :)". And although there's nothing wrong with that, it's the intention. All my real friends know about my life. Like everyone else's, it has its ups and downs. They will all see the pictures from my vacation because they will come see me and I will show them or we'll get together at some point. They will all know when I'm engaged or married or having a baby, because I will pick up the phone and call them and tell them. The only reason I would post it on Facebook is for the fake "friends". And why do they need to know the details of my life? That is the question and also the answer. So when I feel myself losing myself. I withdraw a little, turn inward and focus on what is here now. The people who truly love me and will be there for me and would show up to my funeral if I died today. I deactivated my account to prove that Socrates was wrong when he said, "The unexamined life is not worth living". Oh a less sour note, Facebook has its place when used correctly. Sometimes there are people who do honestly care about you and you about them. And maybe they are far away, and Facebook is a convenient way to share your life with them from across the country or across the world or wherever. That said, I'm almost certain that most people don't use Facebook strictly in this way. 9 times out of 10 it's in the ways I described above, especially among young people. Anyway, it feels good to disconnect, and thereby reconnect to what really matters here and now. Facebook, we shall meet again soon. Until then, farewell!