On Facebook, Distractions and Real Friendships

Several weeks ago, I deleted my Facebook account. Several weeks ago, my life seemed to get a lot better.

Ian Hines recently wrote:

If there are nouns — obligations, people, things, etc. — that you’ve allowed into your life that are holding you back from what you know is important to you, that should raise a red flag. Why are you tolerating those distractions?

To me, Facebook was a huge source of distractions.¹

I totally get that for some people, Facebook allows for communication that they wouldn’t otherwise have. My dad is friends with all of this high school buddies on there, and has re-kindled relationship decades-old.

But I am not one of those people.

I could separate my Facebook friends into two distinct groups:

• People I know — and talk to — in real life.
• People I used to know, but haven’t talked to in years — mostly from high school and college.

See the problem? Facebook didn’t add much value to the relationships I want to have, and added lots of noise in the form of fake relationships with people I don’t care about anymore.

While it may be hard to tell from across the Internet, I am actually an introvert. I can count close friends on one hand, and my other friends with the other. It’s not that I actively dislike people — I just have a difficult time connecting with people in meaningful ways, and trivial connections simply annoy me. I’ve turned avoiding social outings into an art form, and it is something that has frustrated my wife for years. Facebook — from the day it launched at the University of Memphis and I joined — always pressed me out of my comfort zone, but not in a way that was actually helpful.

At this stage in my life, I’m keeping up with who I want to in ways besides Facebook. Reading status messages and seeing photos of people I went to high school with — and barely knew then — are just distractions. And I can’t afford too many distractions.

James Shelley recently wrote about distractions and what conversations should be like:

Let’s say you and I decided to get together for coffee. We set aside an hour at a specific place to meet.During this conversation I hope to hear and share in your recent, personal experiences. I want to know how you are seeing and feeling the world around you.But if we vomit every single detail of our lives on each other — that is: what we ate for breakfast; the latest app we installed on our iPhone; our highest score on a mobile game; or detailed every item of our personal schedule since the last time we chatted — we would surely not get around to discussing the deeper nuances of what life has been teaching us. We’d be so hard pressed to squeeze in a play-by-play commentary of our daily doings we might risk being too distracted by minutiae to discuss what we have actually learned and interpreted from our activities.

I think Shelley nails my annoyance with Facebook right on the head.

Since leaving Facebook, there have been a handful of times where I’ve missed it. Usually, the desire sprung up out of boredom — not wanting to see what a random person was up to. Only once have I needed Facebook to contact someone, but my wife had their contact info, so it wasn’t a big deal. Still, I can see how the latter may be an issue in the future.

That said, I don’t miss it. Since leaving, I’ve communicated far more over email and the phone. I’ve met more people for breakfast and lunch to catch up. While my overall number interactions with other people is down, those interactions have been far more meaningful.

And that’s what I need more than distractions.