At the time I’m writing this, I still haven’t been on Facebook since the last time I said I haven’t been on it. I think it’s been four weeks now. Anyone astutely aware of my existence might notice the complete lack of activity from me there, not that I was ever really active in the first place, but combined with the fact that my brog is still down without any timeline of when it will be back up, and I may as well seem like I don’t exist anymore.
There was a part of me that thought about going Facebook dark until my brog gets back up, but given that I have a general understanding of what the current status is, that could be a little while. However, I don’t really particularly feel like I’ve missed out on anything since I decided to shun checking Facebook outright, instead of fifty times a day like I found myself doing prior.
In a way, all the articles floating out there lamenting about the anxieties people occasionally feel by not being included in the things that their Facebook friends are blatantly or passive-aggressively boasting about doing, feels kind of true, because me not knowing about the things people are doing means I can’t possibly feel left out or excluded. Not to mention that I’m not privy to those people out there who use Facebook as a means to vent about the mistakes they make with their lives or just to make poorly veiled jabs at mutually known people and to air out their slightly sweaty but not visibly dirty laundry.
Sometimes, I get tempted to go back and check, just because I might be bored and feeling fidgety, and I want something to look at. After basically a month of not doing it, it’s like how I described my old LiveJournal days, where the neglect manifested into something of a creature in itself that sustained on neglect. Like a good pet owner, I didn’t want to deprive it of its sustenance, so I kept neglecting it and kept neglecting it, until one day I changed my brog to WordPress, and announced to my 50 or so LJ friends that I was giving up on LiveJournal and I had my own site to vomit all my words onto.
I doubt that such will be the case with Facebook, because unlike LiveJournal, I think Facebook is actually useful, mostly on account of that it’s basically the global standard when people talk about social media to begin with, and not the bitching platform that was only used by nerds that was briefly seen on The Social Network. Eventually, I’ll slide back into the spectrum of feeling like an island, which ultimately was the reason why I joined Facebook in the first place, and then I’ll go back; or I’ll accidentally click the app on my phone, realize it’s open and my status will have notated it as such, and then just say fuck it, and start looking around again.
But until the time comes when I decide to stop being such a holier-than-thou hipster, and dive back into Facebook, I’m kind of content right now ignoring it. I’m kind of amused that because I’ve been dark for so long, it’s not only getting to the point where I’m getting these automated emails listing all of the detailed notifications I’ve missed, but I’m also getting notified when random people are updating their status; you know, randomly one of the 160 Facebook “friends” I have, throwing up a blurb about something, that I clearly must read, for Facebook to notify me of.
