The other week, I wrote a post called, A Small Thought On Facebook. Blogger Aneroid Ocean, commented thusly:
I’ve never understood the whole “I want to delete my facebook” thought process. Sure, there’s some major downsides to it, but overall if you employ judicious security settings and keep your whore-friending to a minimum it can be pretty useful and can be a great networking tool.
When I said I’d examine the long story with facebook, I was hoping I could uncover an email I sent to Delusion Damage a while ago with my thoughts on the subject. Unfortunately, he has since not replied to my request to see it after I realized I used his contact form and therefore had no copy of my thoughts saved for myself. However, I believe I can still articulate my thoughts on the subject. You see, I have a love hate relationship with Facebook. On one hand, Facebook is great for keeping in touch with friends. Without Facebook, I probably would have lost a bunch of friends to my history including some of my best friends. I am also able to keep up with some of my family and annoy my sister by continually posting links to various manosphere pieces or ridiculous examples of FRA.
However, I feel like Facebook also degrades your relationships with people. God forbid you post “in a relationship”. Suddenly, all your friends are privy to the drama that is your relationship. It’s more dramatic when you break up and if you cheat or she cheats on you, people squawk squawk sqauwk. Facebook is no friend of the player. But even worse, Facebook degrades the friendships of yours that have value. You take it for granted that can contact any of your best friends at a moment’s notice. You talk to them less because you’re busy and because you’ve got nothing more to talk about. And when you finally do meet, you have this weird conversation where you want to catch up but it’s weird because they’ve been Facebook stalking you and kind of know your story anyway.
Facebook makes you lazy and makes that crucial element to miss someone, that is, separation, quite trivial indeed. And I still think we are only seeing some of the negative side affects.
~Wald
That’s why I’m not on Facebook.
That and it’s giving away your information to the CIA for free.
That is why I detailed the steps I would go through should I ever delete my facebook, in my last post.
Well said. It is hard to interact with cyber-occupied people in real life. Thanks for sharing about the checkpoint vid with BP. Interesting.
Check-point video? I didn’t share any video on this post.
Thanks for the clarification.
However, I have to wonder about the whole “setting relationship status” on Facebook. I’ve never wanted to do this, have never even considered doing it. If a girl ends up my girlfriend, that’s fine, all my friends and family will know when I tell them, not when Facebook tells them. That’s stupid.
I regularly delete people and I don’t post stuff that is MRA/Red Pill related since I value my anonymity online and I don’t care to hear other people’s opinion on it since most people won’t understand. Those friends that do, I talk to them about it in person.
I have noticed the effect of being in touch but not really growing friendships with people, but I’ve also noticed that I know about a lot more social events and things I could be doing, as well as learn things I wouldn’t otherwise know about certain people. I think that with some self-discipline, Facebook can be a really useful tool. You can also hurt yourself with it.
It’s just a tool, like any other. Use it correctly and apply it discerningly and it can be a huge boon to your life. Use it incorrectly or misapply it, you might just end up seriously hurting yourself.
I believe I apply it correctly. After putting “in a relationship” with my first girlfriend on there, I vowed never to put relationship status on my profile again, to keep my relationship off of Facebook as much as possible.
Inevitably I talked with my exes a lot over Facebook which circumvents that, but my relationships weren’t for the world to see.
I just lament that it seems that friendships just aren’t what they used to be, when you add in Facebook. The people I enjoy seeing the most are the one’s who are on Facebook the least, because I can tell them more about my life and they can tell me more about theirs.