Well, as I find that Facebook has depressed me to no end....I determined it was time to find some validation on my own...without the help of 370 people who will not even notice I am gone! I'm 58 years old. Things have become very complex in life. Families have trouble staying connected and we often find ourselves all sitting around looking at our phones rather than looking at and talking to our friends and partners. More and more studies show that the entire social media is actually taking us further from feeling connected and making us feel more and more isolated. And often depressed. Many people use Fb as a way to A) validate their lives B) make everyone else think their lives are perfect. And since we can't know the truth about their reality, we often assume that our normal life is somehow sadly lacking.
Two years ago I didn't even know what Fb was or how it worked...and when I did ...I LOVED it. Here were people that would "like" my pictures and my posts. Pick me up when I felt down. And generally make me feel loved/important. Then, quite by accident, I wasn't able to post for almost two weeks. Surprisingly enough, only three people noticed. It seems we have become conditioned to click "like" and quickly type out short sentences like "totally true" and "couldn't agree more" and "lol"! Often I would post articles I found that were A) well written and thought provoking B) sourced from reliable sites and surprisingly, I found that people will like, but not read~ at all! But, out of the 370 friends I have I found a handful who did and had intelligent comments to offer. So, I had to wonder~ what is it that is driving us to get approval from folks we don't even know? What makes us feel so alone in such a crowded world?
These, and more questions I will ponder in the future....
One of the downsides of facebook for me, is that many of my friends are extremely passionate about the various conflicts that they have decided to join up with. Save the wild horses, stop slaughter, rescue dogs...Mexican horses beaten to be Charro horses...the list goes on. And all valid and all things that need to be dealt with or repaired or corrected. But, and this is the big but for me, it was depressing. It was never ending...please donate to this and contact this congressman and please help us get this legislation through. All worthy. All important. All needing to be brought to the public's attention. But, exhausting. Facebook was supposed to be a "social" media. A place to post your kid pic's and mention that you had a great ride. But, somehow it went far past that. Lots of adverts. Lots of personal angst played out on pages. Lots of moaning about life and the difficulty of being a photographer, horse trainer, farrier... And you can't just turn people off. Once they are your friends you have to take the good with the bad... the drama with the boring. And no matter what fb settings you try to figure out ...it seems that the newsfeed will play it out to someone somewhere. Facebook has deliberately made it so obtuse that most of us can't figure out how it works...or how to limit what we see and what can be seen. I suppose its my failing to not delve deeper into the whole underpinnings and find out HOW to set up an account that is very limited in its scope...and that would entirely be my fault.
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