I reluctantly joined Facebook a little over a year ago after caving into some hard-core peer pressure. (Yes, I know...I'm weak, so weak)! Relatively quickly I got back into contact with a ton of old friends and even some former really great friends who I had just lost contact with over the years. It was nice catching up, hearing about what was going on in their lives, and going through pictures of their kids. It felt like the past 10-15 years had been condensed into a high-light reel, which is many instances is a good thing.
But then I started getting friend requests from people I barely knew in high school and/or college. My first instinct was to reject the friend request, but I figured that might be too mean, so I started approving everyone. You know, it just seems a bit ridiculous though that if I never spoke to you or you me in real life that we are all of a sudden Facebook pals.
Then for some of these people (and in all honesty some actual friends as well) their Facebook page became the place for them to rant about politics or religion or the state of education and on and on and on. Truthfully, that is the part I HATE, LOATHE, DESPISE about Facebook. I started hiding "these people" from my news feed and then I started deleting them as friends. The one good thing about Facebook is that when you defriend someone they don't send out a notice announcing that a defriending has taken place. I can just slink quietly away and hope they forget about me and our Facebook friendship.
I have thought regularly about deleting my account entirely, but then realized I would miss the updates from actual friends who live half a world away. It is a quick, easy way to keep in touch with people I am friends with in "real life" and I wouldn't want to sacrifice that because of a few annoyances.
So, today I bravely logged on and started deleting "friends." My criteria was simply two-fold: a)If we weren't friends or spoke on a regular basis in real life then you were cut; b)If we haven't communicated regularly through Facebook in the past 6 months you were cut. At first I was super hesitant to hit that "delete friend" button. Pretty soon though I had deleted around 30 people and here, five minutes later, I probably couldn't tell you one of their names. It felt freeing, liberating!
Are you on Facebook? Do you occasionally "weed out" friends?
3 comments:
Haha! No, i'm not on facebook, but i so know what you mean. I had entered my blog into a blog-hop here on blogger and suddenly, in a day, had about 28 extra "followers". The rule there being you follow that person back, i was suddenly draining myself reading ALL of their blog posts just so i didn't do injustice to anyone. I saw after a week and a half of terrible exhaustion and hurting eyes line by deep dark-circles, that very few of these were actually reading me back.
Sudden motivation. Snap. I got back to reality. I hit the "stop following" button on several of these. They didn't bother THOUGH in my case, a number went down on each of their dashboards. Lesson learned for me. I never participated in the next weekly blog hop. But, i did make some very very good blogger friends in that one day and they, thankfully remain.
Liberating, without the slightest trace of guilt. Enjoy your freedom. You're going to love it!
I think about deleting my own profile every other week because I find FB so annoying! But, it is nice to reconnect with some old friends and see what everyone is up to.
I hadn't deleted any "friends" but maybe I should start...
I refuse to join. It is working well for me right now.
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