Outta Time Units (October 2012)
On deleting 1,000 Facebook friends, and the baggage that went with them.
Okay, so I did it. I deleted 1,000 people off my Facebook account. Friends no more, right? Not really. It is strange that we live in an age where our social presence is measured more and more by our online presence. I had been running at about 1,400 friends for a while, glad to have that many connections and figuring I would keep them around for future work. But I have been going through some changes and moves lately, and it made me reflect on how much resentment I was still carrying around.
Before the mass extermination, my news feed had become more and more nonsensical, and every so often someone would post a random status that dragged a whole friendship, and all the memories and circumstances around it, back to the surface. Some of those memories are good. But a lot of them reminded me of times and situations I would honestly rather not revisit, things I needed to let go of and move on from. The strange part is that the memory tied to a person did not actually dictate how I felt about them. I might have had a few good times with someone, but their posts kept yanking me back to a period of my life I needed to be done with.
A lot of these were friends from college, or even high school. Remember when Facebook was fresh and everyone wanted to connect with everyone they had ever met? I would think, hey, I remember so-and-so from college, of course I want to connect. Except half the time I never really spoke to or knew that person, even back then. It was a bizarre era, and I am pretty sure we all went through that phase.
So I have tried to simplify my life and grow into the person I feel God is leading me to be, and to do that I needed to let some things go. I really did not realize how much baggage I was carrying around on Facebook alone. Every time I tried to release some resentment, another status from so-and-so would carry me right back into the pain of years past, even though that person had nothing to do with those memories beyond being around at the time. I do not think the human mind was built to actively support thousands of relationships at once. We cope by letting people go, and sometimes by forgetting. That may sound cold, but it is a fact of life. If I ran into one of them at the local Starbucks, would I love to grab a coffee and catch up? Absolutely. I would love to continue a friendship in person. But for many of us, our online lives have simply become too cluttered.
After the purge, I find I am now connected with the people, family and friends who are actually current in my life, and I can manage that. I can finally move on from a great many things. One practical note if you try this yourself: Facebook no longer lets you mass-delete friends, preferring you remove them one at a time. There are browser tools that automate it if you follow the directions carefully. And with that, it seems I have run out of time units.