Kyle Quit The Band — MD

Chris Mathews
Aug 22, 2017 · 3 min read

And the they’re not getting back together again..

Last night I FINALLY decided to deactivate my Facebook account. I weighed up the pros and cons and the decision unamiously was angled towards leaving.

The downsides: I’m going with a 90 day trial so the downsides are hardly worth talking about but for the sake of the arguement I’ll list them without a my rhetoric. I’ll lose touch with all of the good friends I’ve made travelling, it will be harder to know what’s going on event wise where I live. That’s about all I’ve got to be honest.

Why have I made this decision? Over the last few months I have noticed how little I care what anybody posts on FB. I reformatted my newsfeed to hide all friends posts and replace it with the sponsored content from my chosen pages that I follow…yet I still check it. It’s hard to make myself not sound like a narcissistic asshole but maybe to some degree the narcissism is healthy. I find the simplicity of the mob frustrating. Anytime I’ve seen a remotely genuine / interesting post from a facebook connection it’s greeted with one of two responses. Either overwhelming amounts of support. About 85% of which is people jumping on the praise bandwagon because the other 159 friends have before them. It feels ingenuine. Secondly, the interesting post which is shot down in flames. Which usually means it is somewhat controversial, yet still serves some merit to an arguement. This is when I realised that FB is no different to mainstream media or a Presidential run for office. You can’t have a nuanced opinion in the public domain. It’s the mob mentality. You go with the flow of people with the simple, most politically correct social narrative or face their wrath. As someone who appreciates an arguement and relishes in chaos in order to find patterns or new ways of thinking, I like to consider myself exceptionally open minded and FB is not a platform that caters well for this.

It saturates time, when was the last time you logged onto FB for 45 minutes and actually meant to do that? When I open my phone and scroll through reading arbitary articles, I honestly think in my own head that it will take no longer than about 30 seconds. Totally guilty of it. Another reason why it has to go, I believe that basically the identity we present to the world is that of a sponge. It takes form of the content you expose yourself to on a regular basis. Similar to whoever said that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Here’s a great paradox about me, I’m so certain about what I believe and can speak with a fair amount of conviction that has been to known to give off an air or arrogance and norrow mindedness. That’s cool, you can’t impress everyone. But, how do you think I got like that? By being supremely open minded. Being open to all arguements, exploring ideas in depth, asking lots of questions, not just accepting what’s put in front of me, forming my own opinions. So nearly all of my strong belief systems are formed from a solid foundation of my very own self approval and quality control. Therefore, this is just another exercise in my filtering process. If I have 45 minutes a day, on occasions more, to seemingly scroll through blogs and posts, it won’t be from the arbitary crap FB has to offer. It will be either blogging sites like this, where people form their own opinions or YouTube where the camera seems to bring out the honest in all. There will be someone who reads this who takes everything I say literally to the final word.

The crux of it is this, I find FB a very simple place and often very frustrating. What I’ll tell the world..it’s temporary productivity hack..

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