Digital Suicide

(a bit whiney this one. But I'll bet you can relate.)

It's impersonal. It's faceless. It's full of stalkers. It's a waste of time. It's Facebook.

And I refuse to socialize like this anymore. I deleted my Facebook, as best as I can*.

A friend said to me, "If you delete your Facebook, you'll basically cease to exist."

Well, fine. I don't want to exist if that's what this means. I'd rather be a ghost, floating through life unaccounted for, off the grid. Gone.

I remember when MySpace first became popular. Some friends were talking about being up all night, talking to each other. I felt left out, so got an account as a joke. I predicted it was a fad, but five years later, I'm an adult and still using a similar childish application.

So now, I refuse to allow my friendships be numbered and ordered and pushed into grids. People shouldn't be shelved away like dusty library books. And I'm tired of being watched silently by people who are supposed to care about me. If someone does care, they "like" it. That's it. No one really talks to me online anymore or reads what I write except five core people.

I already talk to these five on a daily basis and would tell them about my day-to-day regardless. For everyone else, shame on you. Why the fuck am I forced to talk to you through social networking? Yes, forced. If I delete my Facebook, I'll never hear from you again. Why can't you be adults, living people dammit, and just give me a phonecall one day? Why are we communicating through screens? Smoke screens, even! Are you expressing true emotion or putting on a front? How the hell can I tell? Why are we ranking each other, ignoring each other, adding each other, like some kind of insane baseball card collector?

I've felt this way about social networking for a long time, but I didn't stop because I wanted others to care about what I had to say. Yeah, that's right. I stopped caring about the stupid shit you were spewing, but not enough to stop spewing it myself.
And nobody cared, except those five people. Those five people that I would rather talk to in real life anyway. It's degrading to do otherwise.

Now I don't care who cares about me. I don't know why I ever did. But this is like inviting everyone you know to a birthday party. Of those who show up, you know they really care. Well, no one has showed up to my life, so I'm cutting the cords on this dead weight. (haha, that sounds like a suicide note. And maybe it is, in a way. I'll no longer be anyone now. I've committed digital suicide.)

Goodbye, Facebook. Good riddance.
I'm going to treat the people in my life like people. I'll now have hours of spare time freed up that I won't waste on your stupid website. So I'm going back to reading books. Keeping a journal. Going outside.
I'm going to create, love, breathe and die.
It's sad that I let you get in my way.

Computers are a weed, rapidly outgrowing themselves. They are a virus that replicates the human mind.
They will never outgrow the capacities of the human brain because we will never accommodate them.
A human being cannot create something better than himself.
Even the Tower of Babel crumbles beneath us.

I predict a great computer crash. When they cannot advance any further at all, people get stuck, stop feeling amazed with pixels and .mp3 downloads.
Then people will return to their lives and embrace them like never before. It will be a time of great prosperity.

Or not.


*You can't really delete your Facebook, only deactivate it. This is disturbing in and of itself. Facebook will always retain your personal information. One log-in and you'll get it all back, exactly how you left it. I'm not going back, I've promised myself, but it'll always be there.