You are grazing on Facebook

Because you’re bored.

Because you’re addicted to swiping your finger across your tablet and smart phone and you’re so slick that you never leave a smear, even when you’re holding a half-eaten burrito in one hand.

You are swiping to be entertained by other people’s boredom and bad news and pictures of happy kids and LOL cats. You sweep past the link that offers 5 ways to make your online content more compelling and hover over the video with 11,253 likes of the tourist who got run over while taking pictures of an old man begging in a shanty town whose name you cannot spell.

You blink at the green status lights of all the other lonely Eleanor Rigby people, lit up though it’s early morning and beds must lie waiting with loved ones. You wonder at the groundhog day of your own being. For you haven’t updated your status for a couple of days and update it you must.

You click on the link which leads to a social media marketing post on how you can reach more than 2% of your fans on Facebook. Your social capital is now a percentage, your hundreds of unknown friends in your social graph waiting for you to write something, share something, do something.

Then on the right hand side of the screen, you notice five empty lines, reminiscent of a copybook you used for the scribbles that liberated your boredom from the drone of the voice of an elderly, well-meaning secondary school teacher.

Five empty lines that coax you to the command

Create Advert

Then just before you click to obey, as obey you must, to keep the machine of capitalism oiled and its owner fed, for a second you see your very own advert imprinted in the neon lights in the back of your head.

FU FB

And instead you click the tiny red X in the top right hand corner of your browser and snap back to the reflection of yourself on the screen.

And thus, you are momentarily liberated from the unbearable lightness of Facebook.