Let’s Look at Facebook

I’ve been reflecting on the place of Facebook in my life this morning.

I know, I know. People post about quitting Facebook every day, and we all roll our eyes and wait for them to come back. But why do we always come back? Is it because we don’t want to miss out? We miss keeping up-to-date with friends and family (and the latest memes)? Or is there something more going on?

For a while now, I’ve suspected that Facebook actually taps into a part of our brains that controls us from a much deeper place than simply deciding whether we want to be here or not. I think we’re hard-wired to crave social connection, and we live in a culture of loneliness and alienation. Visiting Facebook gives us a serotonin rush that fills that gap, and makes us feel really good in the process. In fact’s an article that citing the research that proves it: http://davidrainoshek.com/2013/06/how-facebook-fb-is-altering-your-mind-2/

But it’s junk food. We all know it. Junk food. It’s not real connection with people, and the content is as fleeting as a TV commercial. In fact, scrolling my feed kind of feels like viewing crowd-sourced commercials for different versions of reality at an extremely fast rate. A way faster rate than TV was ever able to achieve.

Don’t get me wrong, I love knowing what people are going through, hearing awesome new musicians, and laughing at funny videos. But does it fulfill me? Does it make my day-to-day life better? I’d have to say no.

Another thing I’ve noticed is how horrible about myself I feel after I spend time here. I see friends of friends that I don’t know, and I think thoughts like this: “He’s so beautiful and open, why can’t I be more like that? Oh my God, they bought a house, had a kid, and their marriage is still going that well? I’m so jealous! Why haven’t I visited Thailand yet? It seems like everybody else has!” And then I feel like worthless.

Over the past months, I’ve ping-ponged back and forth between deleting my account, having the Facebook app on my phone, or not, and using an app called selfControl to keep myself from viewing Facebook for 8 hour stretches. I want to stop. I really can’t do it. I’m absolutely addicted.

I’m writing this because I’m hoping some of you will read past the first paragraph. Then I hope you’ll stop and actually think about whether continuing on here is worth it. Not just thinking, “oh yeah, I want to leave Facebook but I’ll do it later, after XYZ thing in my life”. But actually stopping, looking at yourself and your relationship with this “place”, and asking yourself if you want this. If you want it this much, if you want it at all, if you want to use it this way.

I’m not trying to preach to you. I hope that you do this because it’s time that we collectively stop and think about what we’re doing in a conscious way. Let’s not just float along and ride the wave of serotonin. Let’s actually make a conscious choice about how we collectively want to relate to each other. And how we as individuals choose to spend our short, precious lives.