Browse Tag: addicted to facebook

Facebook Rehab: The halfway point

Hi readers 🙂

I recently blogged about my intention to cut out Facebook for a month. I thought I’d share a few side-effects now that I’m at the halfway point.

1.) iPhone battery lasts longer. The battery on this wondrous phone is awful, but it’s much less awful now that I no longer screw around on Facebook all the time.

2.) More efficient use of daily time. I used to wake up before sunrise, but then over coffee, I’d start Facebooking. Somebody please, cue up your favorite rendition of “Who Knows Where the Time Goes?” because that’s the very question I used to ask myself whenever my time disappeared into the Facebook vortex. I gladly report that this is no longer a problem.

Facebook vortex *

3.) Less anxiety. When I was cruising facebook aimlessly, I had guilt sitting like a rock in my belly. This is no longer the case and I gladly report that I am less anxious.

4.) Self-pity. Yeah, I know–not a desirable side-effect. I’d feel frustrated sometimes, like that painful, mouthwatering sensation that overtakes your body when you’re not allowed to take a potato chip from the plate of Lays sitting in front of you. One night, thanks to my TiVo, I did a 24 marathon and finally watched the last 6 episodes of the series. As the final minutes played out and I cried with Chloe O’Brian and watched Jack Bauer fade away, I actually felt sorry for myself that I couldn’t whine about the end of my favorite show on facebook.  I thought, ‘Lose facebook AND 24 in the same week?’ Anyway, I got over it 5 minutes later. Sometimes my husband sits near me, logs in, and says something like, “Ohh, so and so posted her first pregnancy picture.” Insert itch-that-can’t-be-scratched sensation. How many times did I want to bitch to the facebook community about Italy’s crybaby tactics on South Africa’s fields? Many times, but I engaged in animated discussions about it with my husband and father instead. Sidenote: How crazy was Italy vs. Slovakia??!

5.) True face time. I admit that I’m generally over-addicted to my iPhone. The apps, the email, the games, and worst of all, the facebook. Now that I use my phone a lot less, I’ve become keenly aware of people who are plugged into their smartphones–I’m talking zero eye contact during a conversation so long as the damn phone is in their hands. I readily recognize that this is a growing epidemic of rudeness, and I renounce this awful behavior for my part. I vow not to look at random info on my phone while talking to people. This new self-imposed rule has enabled me to converse meaningfully with people in a pre-smartphone way: no distractions, complete focus. Of course, I owe my friends and loved ones that courtesy anyway.

Bottom line: Life was always good, but these days, life is better; I’d be lying, however, if I said I didn’t miss facebook.

Photo Credit: “Facebook is Scary” by Kevin Saff

Experiment: Facebook rehab

Hi readers.

Chances are, if you’re a close friend of mine, we’re probably friends on Facebook. And if you’re my friend on Facebook, you know that I spend plenty of time there. Recently though, my addiction has begun to weigh heavily on me. One of my best friends had given up Facebook access as a sacrifice for Lent 2010, describing the website as “crack.” I’ve come to see it the same way. I can no longer ignore or deny that I’m addicted to this website. One of the worst things about it? That’s it’s not even just confined to being a website anymore–it’s on my phone too. For God’s sake, it’s EVERYWHERE. So I check in “real quick”–in quotes, because it’s most often never quick–ALL the time. The most common letdown is that usually, it turns out that nothing exciting has happened in the last 120 seconds (the amount of time that has lapsed since I last looked).

Of course, the very nature of Facebook is designed to keep you hooked. Hyperlinks everywhere, in the form of random faces that you want to click on. Quite often, before you know it, you’ve got twenty tabs open and you’re making mental notes to return to this person’s profile and that person’s picture album. Yada yada yada, so goes facebook’s never-ending story.

And the games? Forget it. I made the mistake of starting to play an online facebook game called Restaurant City, a Sims-esque restaurant-focused game. The “goal” of the game is to build your restaurant, decorate it, hire people and keep them fed, and master all of the food and drink dishes that you serve. The problem is that this game is an online form of soap opera–there’s no end in sight; the goal is to never reach an end goal. This game keeps sending more and more novelties to settle and colonize my mental landscape. It’s become quite the time suck.  How bad has it gotten? This bad: I created a whole secondary profile just to play this game. Fake Me’s restaurant was supposed to be a place from which Real Me could siphon off whatever I needed. But Fake Me wanted more. Fake Me’s restaurant is now more ornate and grandiose than Real Me’s restaurant is. The energy, time and focus needed to run Fake Me and Real Me’s restaurants is staggering.

Long story short, it’s all just too much for me now and I’m about to short-circuit. So I’ve decided to cut it out for a month. I know it’ll be hard–I love seeing what everyone’s up to, checking out friends’ and relatives’ pictures, and making my restaurant pretty, but the truth is that this one website keeps me from being engaged in what’s really going on around me. I check in too often when I could be doing more productive/meaningful things. So I’ll be deleting the phone app for the month, and I’ll block the website on my computer temporarily. Facebook is one of the main places where I advertise my blog posts, so I’ll have to find some way around that little issue–I’ll probably just click “Share on Facebook” directly from my blog posts so that I’m not tempted to log into my account, but I sincerely hope that my friends keep on reading anyway.

So if you need to reach me, you can do so outside facebook. I look forward to reporting from a more peaceful, self-aware mindset  😉