Well, I Did It!

Somehow I'm filled with the thrill of accomplishment when all I did was to remove an irritant from my daily life.  But let's face it, how often do we manage this kind of positive step?

My previous post was about fanaticism and on the spur of the moment I tossed out a simple thought while speaking of my disgust with a contact on my facebook account.  That thought was "just un-friend the whole website."

So now you might call me a fanatic also, but all I am is old and cranky, easily frustrated by a few things - such as daily email messages to check this or that notice that is pending.

Today I did it!  Over the year (or maybe three?) that I was a participant in that "social" media, I found it useful not at all and quite often the notices in my emails and some of the posts I did eventually see were downright irritating.  I suddenly asked myself the straight-forward question: Why would I invite and encourage a daily irritant in my life?  Aren't there enough of these that we cannot control?  While musing on my thought of un-friending the website, I tried to recall a specific unquestioned benefit I had realized from my having joined the facebook world.  Couldn't do it.  Oh, it was nice being able to look at the photo album of a grand-niece's wedding, to which my brother had to guide me to locate.  But he could have sent me a direct email with a few pictures attached and his sharing this highlight of family life would have been just as well served. 

What I began to realize, aside from the fact I was forever deleting the incessant notices that I was expected to rush to check out, was that the whole social media claim itself was a little weak for my taste.  Much of what began to be shared was anti-social behavior, and whenever I decided to respond to anything - even when I could figure out what was worth it and how to reply - it was usually something that mildly upset me to deal with.  I am not by nature confrontational and so many entries on that site needed rebuttal if they deserved attention at all.  It finally just got to be much more exhausting than I had the energy to address.

So not to be stymied like the cowboy in Brokeback Mountain, I looked at that mass of comments and questions, entries from far-reaching places and many folks I've never met, and said, Facebook, I CAN quit you!  And forthwith, I deleted my account.  Took me a while and quite an effort because as many observers know, I never was completely capable of navigating that confusing site, but I found the right place to click and I clicked.  Now I feel a weight has been lifted!  My world is lighter because it is less demanding of my personal attention to someone's birthday or another new baby somewhere, or to someone's goofy little cry for attention, to someone else's proverbial slap in the face that needed a return jab that hopefully might "slap some sense into him," and so much else that made that site, to me, not very sociable.  More irritant than entertainment; more demand than delight; more revolting than refreshing.

So long, Facebook - Hello sense of relief!