Purgatory is just a click away
I thought my compulsive Facebook checking would ebb naturally after a month or so. It has not. I now have 109 “friends” and am getting kind of competitive about it. There are a selection of people gathered from almost every phase of my life, like the strangest and not necessarily the most fun cocktail party I can imagine. As a real-life acquaintance (and yes, she’s a Facebook friend too) said recently about her odd assembly of people, we’re not meant to collect everyone we’ve ever known in one real-time although virtual location. Her example was that the guy that broke your heart at 17 needs to stay forever as he was at that age in your mind, and that you’re not meant to know that he’s now chubby and bald, married with two kids, and that he’s checking Facebook on his Iphone from Starbucks, procrastinating, on his way to Home Depot, or whatever his “status update” says he’s doing.
Hearing Facebook described this way made it seem less like a social networking site than a wry, God-free look at heaven. It also underlined what I always knew Facebook is (at least for me) — a way station for people who feel disconnected and yet can’t manage having everyone they’ve ever known on their speed dial. I guess this makes Facebook my purgatory. Here is where I can go to visit an incomplete gallery of regrets and folly, and recall youthful boredom, laughter, and musical taste.
My Facebook life got a little suffocating a few weeks ago. Waves of unrelated people were contacting me, some of them hard to place. It seemed like a huge segment of my time was spent somehow dealing with my “social life”. But unlike my real social life, which consists of birthday parties for 3-year-olds and 6-year-olds and infrequent nights out with my husband and another couple, Facebook demanded less of me but was omnipresent. Decisions to friend or not to friend, what to write on a new friend’s wall, and all of the assessment it required of my place in the world and how I want to remember things, were upon me every time I opened my email in the morning. Then there was the balance of how often and how cleverly to update my status (“Susan is sending in the clowns again.”), and the need not to bore my Facebook friends with inane details (“Susan is eating a mediocre Chinese chicken salad.” “Susan just changed a dirty diaper.”) or spew Too Much Information (“Susan wonders if this constant feeling of Facebook-related ennui will pass.”).
My husband, who first found my Facebook use funny, soon grew annoyed. We were meeting new friends through our children’s schools, and I was cowering at the specter of all of the socializing to come. ”Please don’t let Facebook get in the way of our actual social life,” he said. (NB: A week or so later, he joined Facebook too. He says it was to connect and feel like he was less alone in a world full of conservatives. But I suspect that my obsession was contagious.)
The impetus for some of the Facebook movement in my hometown circle of acquaintances was our 20th high school reunion last year. It’s been interesting. After the class reunion, I was left with the strange, quiet understanding that where and when I came from was wonderful. My classmates were like long-lost family members who behaved with decency and tolerance towards one another. Many places I have been since high school have such people in them, but plenty do not.
I have thought about going cold turkey with Facebook, but that’s unlikely. I would like to be less obsessive about it. Between this online community and the worrying about/keeping tabs on the election, which seem like my two dueling reality shows, there’s just way too much brain space and time being sucked away. The three-dimensional world beckons.
