Why I deactivated from Facebook

Done, done, and done.

I'm not on Facebook anymore, at least for the time being. I don't think this is going to be a permanent leave--I mean, I didn't even get a chance to say goodbye! (Then again, isn't that how real life works?) And if I did try to say "bye, I'm deactivating," I'd probably find some reason or other to stay. (Been there, done that, so 2010!)

I know the question of "why" is burning on your tongue, and the answer to that is quite long, if I can even manage to form coherent and logical thoughts. I guess I'll start chronologically, and hope that this doesn't turn into too big a mess by the end of this post.

I first made my Facebook account in October of 2008, back before most of the people I knew had Facebook, and only for about two reasons: the first was because I had received two email invitations to join, and the second was because I played this Playfish game, Pet Society (don't judge), with my friend on her Facebook account a couple weeks earlier. It was about the time I started to wean off of my fanfiction addiction too, so naturally I had to find something else. (And there's only so much of one over-hyped series that I could take; not to sound pseudo-hipster, but I liked that series before it was uncool.)

So in the beginning, my time on Facebook was spent dressing up my Pet Society pet, visiting my friends' pets (to earn money so I could buy better outfits for my pet, obviously), playing around with the endless stream of applications that ranged from virtual gift giving to personality quizzes, and occasionally IMing my friends at the same time on Facebook chat rather than Yahoo! Messenger. (Does anybody still use that anymore? Besides me?) For a middle school girl with nothing better to do, Facebook seemed pretty fun.

Because I was in this magnet school type of program that had a total class size of about thirty five kids in my year, my Facebook friend list was relatively small. The majority of them didn't even have accounts until spring of 2009 or later. If there was something that I wanted to know about one of my peers, I probably would've heard it in real life first, considering the fact that I had the exact same class schedule (including electives) as eight other people. Even though that sort of closeness felt suffocating, I guess there was a little bit of charm to it, and the gossip wasn't very interesting. (Then again, it's the eighth grade. What about middle school is particularly noteworthy or interesting? Nothing.)

Sometime (or I guess the entire time) between 2008 and today, Facebook went from being a source of entertainment to an inescapable part of my life. The more "friends" I added, the less frequently I updated anything. My live news feed became cluttered with posts I didn't actually care about, like a status updated from a person I met two years ago dyeing her hair, or a picture of an In-N-Out burger from someone I've never talked to in real life. The longer I was on it, the more impersonal it felt. But at the same time, I found myself wanting to soak all of this random crap up. It made me feel like I knew a little bit more about these people around me, even though I didn't actually know them.

How many of these hundreds of "friends" did I actually feel like I was friends in "real life" with though? And how many of them did I actually talk to more than once every six months or something? I know; there's always the option to "unfriend" all of those extraneous Facebook friends of mine, but that doesn't exactly solve the main problem at hand: I was wasting my time doing nothing productive.

(And while you could probably make the argument that blogging/tweeting/reblogging is a waste of my time too, I have semi-legit sounding reasons to counter you. This is what debate does to a person.)

I'm not saying all my time spent on that site was wasted--in fact, I've had a lot of meaningful conversations with friends, found out due dates for upcoming homework assignments, and generally been pretty satisfied with what it's had to offer me. But I spent way too much time doing absolutely nothing and waiting. And waiting. And waiting, for something, for anything to happen. I hated the anxiety that I felt whenever the person I'm chatting with didn't respond immediately. I hated the sick thrill of getting a new notification. I especially hated the timeline thing that they put into my news feed that showed me exactly who posted exactly what exactly when. As if I need a stupid reason to spend an extra five minutes scrolling through things I didn't need to know.

Because after a while, five minutes turns into ten. Ten, twenty. Twenty, an hour. Two hours. Three hours.

Gone.

Guys, I have no self control. And sometime between October 2008 and now, I became addicted to Facebook. It just wasn't worth it anymore.

The last month of this semester is starting again on Tuesday. I've got seven straight weekends of debate tournaments, finals and final projects in almost every class I'm taking, a fundraiser and a charity dinner to help plan and organize, books to read, projects to research, blog posts to write, outfits to dream of, things to do, and people to see. I don't want to spend my precious time sitting around in front of Facebook, at least for this upcoming month.

I know this sounds crazy coming from a girl who will give up Facebook but not Blogger/Twitter/other internet haunts/the internet, but I want to live at least a little outside of the World Wide Web. At the end of the day, do I really want to remember my teen years as spending endless hours doing nothing of any importance on Facebook?

It's been but a day since I deactivated, and I feel a little dead from the world already. I'm sure there are hundreds of new stories waiting for me to scroll through on my news feed, and I'm sure some of my friends have wondered what happened. If you don't have a Facebook profile these days, you risk being forgotten from time to time. I know I forget some of the people I know in real life who deactivated or never registered to begin with. But life happens, and for the most part, it happens outside, out there, where real people have real conversations and actually laugh out loud and get things done. I envy the people my age who can go without Facebook--they seem to be happier.

Maybe I'll do the things I want now. Maybe I won't. But deactivating gives me a reason to not log back on right this moment. I double-dog-dared myself that I could go one month without Facebook and try and be productive, and I'm not about to give up any time soon.

(Hopefully.)

xoxo, vivian