behind the shutdown

I feel kind of funny dedicating an entire post to defending/explaining my reasons for shutting down my facebook page, but it's kind of hard to explain the reasons on facebook when I no longer have a facebook.  So hopefully the curious are here reading to find out.

These are not in order of importance

1)  I wasted too much time.  At any given moment of any given day, I was logged on to facebook on the computer and/or my iPod.  There were times when I'd be spending the day with family, or I'd be busy with life, only to find myself tethered to a device hours later to catch up on the status updates that I had missed.  Even if nothing interested me, it was a checklist mentality.  I had to see everything in the news feed.  It was controlling me.

2)  I got tired of the changes and resulting news feed.  I'm with everyone on the "leave it the way it is" and "why change a good thing?" complaints.  But at the same time, it was annoying to see only updates about why people liked/didn't like the change.

3)  It simplifies things.  Mark and I have been going through a lot of changes in the past year or so, towards a simpler way of life.  Back to gardening and such.  We use cloth diapers for Roscoe.  We don't own a TV (although we've never had one).  Weeding out facebook seemed appropriate right now.

4)  Facebook doesn't need me.  Not like you have to be needed to have social networking.  I did enjoy the contact with people and the ease of updating everyone on our life.  But facebook doesn't care what the individual user wants.  It doesn't matter if 95% of their users dislike what they're doing, they are going to do it anyway.

5)  We've only seen the beginning of the changes that will be made.  And at least for now, I don't want to go through another round of frustration.

6)  Motives behind having facebook.  For me, I would spend time trying to think up the best status or position Roscoe in the best way for the best picture to get the most comments/likes.  That's just not necessary.  I need to get away from the people pleasing craving.

7)  I could never get facebook to show me the updates I wanted.  I really didn't care about half of what was in the feed, but no matter what I tried, they would only put on my feed what they wanted.  You can't control it as much as you think you can.  Because of that, I felt imprisoned by it.  (Why keep something you don't like?)

It may seem like I'm treating it too seriously.  I probably am.   There's more to life than facebook.  And if I'm itching to get back to a computer or a place with a wireless connection so I can log in on my iPod, then I'm the one with the problem.

I will miss seeing updates from family and friends who are far away.  And who knows, this may not be a permanent thing, but for now, at least this week, I need to step back and not let something as trivial as facebook be such a big and controlling part of my life.