There are more of us than you would think. We walk the street basking in sunshine and smelling the spring air as others around us stare at their phones, updating their Facebook statuses to “OMG! Such a nice day!”
Yes, life is just peachy without Facebook. In fact, better, I would argue. There is something liberating and special about being done with social networking.
Like many Facebook-less people I know, the site used to be an extension of myself. I would visit it as soon as I got home from school. “Just for a few minutes,” I would think. An hour later I would still be logged in, looking at the statuses and pictures of people I had barely spoken five words to in real life, or, even worse, scrutinizing my own statuses and pictures.
I just wanted the site to be a place where I could connect with my peers and show them who I was, but I realized that I wasn’t achieving that on Facebook. In fact, my profile-self was hardly anything like I am in real life.
Online, I used to spend sad amounts of time deciding whether to post a certain video or status or whether to tag or un-tag myself in a picture. My profile ended up being more a projection of parts of myself that I thought other people would like than a real representation of me. For example, on my “about me” page I had lists of bands and activities that I liked. But profile-me certainly wasn’t about to tell the whole world that she liked a band called New Young Pony Club and enjoyed fantasy fiction.
So the gap between my profile and myself grew, and began to irritate me. As time passed, I cared less and less about my Facebook, and I wouldn’t log in for months at a time. When I did finally log in after a particularly long time, I began editing (a process that I now think marked the height of my intolerance for Facebook). I edited and edited my profile until, toward the end, I had edited so much that almost all of my pictures, statuses and messages from all of the past years were completely gone. I considered my new bare-bones profile to be almost perfect. Soon, I realized there was only one thing left for me to do—hit delete.
I had finally realized how absurd and useless Facebook is for someone my age. There are so many things left to do and learn, and an online profile is the last thing you should be wasting your brainpower on.
This summer I’ll celebrate my one-year anniversary of being off the site.
I am not exaggerating when I say I am a smarter, happier and healthier person than I was when I had a Facebook page. I admit that this might be due to how I decided to use all of the time I gained when I quit. However, it remains a solid fact that hours have been added onto my days, and I have significantly less to worry about.
So, if you have it in you, hit delete.
–By Quinn Kerscher