For the past five years I’ve been stuck in an unhealthy relationship.
It started in high school, like many failed relationships do, and lives on solely because of my reluctance to let it go.
I feel so foolish and weak for continuing this self-deceit for so long, but what can I say? I want to break up with Facebook, delete him permanently from my computer and my psyche, but I just keep crawling back to him. (Cue some heartfelt Motown music; I’m thinking “You Keep Me Hangin’ On” by The Supremes.)
For those of you who have also had a love-hate relationship with Mark Zuckerberg’s billion-dollar baby — let’s be frank, he gets around — I pose this question to you: Why do we continue to love Facebook when we openly acknowledge that it’s quite stupid and repugnant?
I’ve compiled a list of some things I don’t like about my relationship with Facebook. I guess you can call it a therapy of sorts; I’ve kept the pain bottled up for so long. Here it goes.
1. The enormous time that I waste doing the most trivial things. This includes, but is not limited to, the two hours I spend uploading an album that I’ll later spend an hour tagging — as if showcasing my friends and experiences proves something about myself.
2. The fact that I’m four years out of high school and still care about what others think of me, and the even worse realization that I still judge them too. Admitting that Facebook has made me constantly compare my life to the lives of others is damn depressing.
3. The guilt trip Facebook puts me through when I try to deactivate it, by showing me pictures of my friends with captions that say “such and such” will miss me. This can cause a serious case of what my friends call FOMO (fear of missing out). This is accompanied by the worry that I’ll become a social outcast upon deletion, because people without Facebooks are just plain weird, right?
Other complaints include: the futility of the poke, overly flattering doppelgangers, advertisements that assume I want diet pills because I’ve listed myself as female, the fact that people only know my birthday because it’s announced on their home page and the list goes on and on.
I mean really, what is it going to take for us to break ties with something that is detrimental to our own well-being? Will we wait as long as CBS did, holding on to Charlie Sheen until his rants and drug use reached catastrophic (tiger blood and Adonis DNA) levels?
I can complain all day, but the plain fact is that I’m still “with” Facebook. As I’m writing this column I’m also Facebook chatting — I am the biggest hypocrite on these opinion pages. This is the real moral conundrum for me. What is it about Facebook that makes Mark Zuckerberg a billionaire, and you and I his little minions?
I have a thesis of sorts; it’s not fit for a senior project or anything but it’s a start. I think I’m so smitten by Facebook because it represents something so essentially human — a desire for permanence and identity.
I see Facebook as a big documentation of one’s life. It’s a place to preserve the memories, the pictures, the insides jokes and the friendships that without it would have been lost in time and left to rot in the backdrop of our memories.
When I contemplate not having a Facebook at all, I contemplate losing my past too. I don’t like letting nature take its course and time passing by — I yearn to preserve it. And in losing my past and my experiences I also fear losing my identity, because what am I but the experiences and things that have happened to me?
Is our love for Facebook really so horrible then? Probably not. It “keeps me hangin’ on” because, well, I like to hold on to things. It’s kind of like a diary, just less poetic and more profit-driven.
Perhaps this thesis is just another coping mechanism for me. Maybe I’m still stuck in the denial phase of my crappy relationship with Facebook. You be the judge. I can’t tell you what I’ll do in the future. I may have a moment of insanity (or arguably, sanity) and delete it once and for all. But for today, I remain a content hypocrite. Friend me!