The Third Behavior: On Breaking Up With Facebook

In my first post for July, I mentioned that I was working on changing three behaviors that had turned into bad habits. The two I had written about were careless eating and drinking, but the post had grown too long to elaborate on the third. As I write about each of these behaviors, I'm confident that it's not just my own dirty laundry I'm airing. I think you, too, dear reader, must share at least one of my questionable habits, and that's why I'm taking the time to spell it all out. It's all in the name of empathy, collective guilt, and rejoicing/self-berating in the joy/pain of too many at-home vodka martinis or whatever the vice. You're welcome to choose an appropriate reaction.

At any rate, I wanted to save the last behavior for its own dedicated post...

About a week or so ago, with the help of my husband, I broke up with Facebook and told it that I only wanted to be friends. I said, "It's not you; it's me." My admission of fault is absolutely true; Facebook has so much to offer in terms of outreach and connection. Nevertheless, it also poses great risks, I think, to individuals like me who communicate best with writing, appreciate wit, struggle with social connection, and succumb to repetitive behaviors and lapses in attention. It seems that each of the things that make Facebook a wonderful place to hang out can be exaggerated so that one becomes a grotesquery, a Facebook troll, and a parody of a Facebooker.

As Facebook functions as a place to write things down to be read in as wide a public setting as we choose based on our number of Facebook friends, it becomes seductive to air thoughts and offer comments or advice. Furthermore, given that Facebook is essentially text-based, I found it tantalizing that I could craft responses and status updates that did not rely on real time. In real time, when someone says something to you, you have x amount of time to respond in a clever or thoughtful fashion whereas on Facebook you can take as much time as you need. You never have to say, "I wish I had thought to say..." or "Why did I say that?..." In this regard, Facebook provides a kind of functionality that appeals to individuals who either communicate best with writing or who like to think before they speak. This becomes grotesque, though, when the individual overspends time crafting responses and status updates to the detriment of spontaneity and face-to-face conversation.

Similarly, Facebook is a great place to work on one-liners. The humor I have regularly seen on Facebook is clever and acerbic. I found myself coming up with one-liners all the time. However, this became grotesque when preoccupation came at the detriment to deeper and longer thought processes. Status updates can not take the place of real work when it comes to writing.

Regarding the social connectivity of Facebook, I have found it both uniting and isolating at the same time. On the one hand, Facebook functions as a digital time machine so that we can move rather fluidly throughout the history of our own lives, connecting and reconnecting with the people who help keep our memories alive. I have had incredibly meaningful interactions with friends from every place I've ever lived. This is why I'm unwilling to abandon it completely. On the other hand, relying solely on Facebook for social interaction is sad. Yet, as a stay-at-home mother whose closest friends live nowhere near Los Angeles, it becomes too easy to revert to introversion and avoid the work required to make new friends in a new town. But how much meaning and depth can be milked from the fly-by-night, brief interactions that Facebook affords? Sitting alone in one's underwear in front of the computer, no matter how many Facebook friends you have, does not a social life make.

Those brief interactions and bits of approval that we get from Facebook are what causes the most trouble, though. We get caught in a hunger for feedback, which leads to repetitive checking and posting. I found I had become stricken with borderline OCD. This is not a joke. Furthermore, the preoccupation of the feedback loop affected my ability to concentrate. It also affected my parenting. When checking Facebook became more important than spending time with my one and only beautiful son, it was time to dump it, or to at least establish a healthy distance. I don't want to look back at Dexter's childhood and think, "If only I had paid attention to my boy instead of chortling about political memes that over-utilized pictures of Gene Wilder as Willie Wonka."

Like anything else, moderation is key. If you can drink your one glass of red wine each night for health purposes, good on ya. If you can log into Facebook once every couple of days to time travel, I commend your restraint. For the rest of us, though, us bacchanalians who would turn our teeth purple with Cabernet with even the slightest provocation, we need to proceed with extreme caution. In fact, sometimes we even have to relinquish our log-in passwords to spouses even if we hate to create a power play like that in our relationships. Although sometimes our spouses are really kind and sympathetic, too.