I gave up on Facebook almost two years ago. It was getting increasingly more difficult to filter out the shit I didn’t want to see and instead of fighting with the ever-changing (largely non-functional) settings of the site, it was just easier to STOP.
It was a fantastic decision.
I don’t miss it in the least.
Sure I have no idea what’s going on with people I actually know, but really, if they miss me at all, nobody’s said anything about it.
I never actually liked Facebook. It always felt like a cumbersome pain in the ass. I had fun playing the stupid games for awhile, but being otherwise active on the site felt more like a chore than something I actually enjoyed doing.
So I quit torturing myself and just quit using the site.
Which is actually a huge victory for me because I am a glutton for punishment when it comes to reading shit on the internet that I know is only going to piss me off to the point of mass homicide.
Anyway.
Twitter has always been better suited to the way my brain functions.
It’s made for fragmented thoughts and short attention spans. I can have a conversation with myself and it goes largely unnoticed. And muting a hashtag or other keyword to avoid seeing posts regarding shit I don’t care to see is way easier than navigating through twelve pages of account settings to find the one box to uncheck that won’t stay unchecked anyway.
I’ve been using Twitter for over seven years. I’ve posted over 9,000 tweets of absolute drivel—venting, flailing, dead-horse-beating, et al—and aside from my original Live Journal account (that I haven’t touched in about four years) it’s the longest I’ve actively used a website.
Until recently.
I think I’m finally twittered out.
Earlier this year I made the semiconscious decision to largely disconnect from the never-ending stream of EVERYTHING hammering down from every angle of the internet. My mental health needed the break. I’ve dealt with (and am still dealing with) a lot of shit this year. A lot of which has been posted about. A lot more of which that has not. It’s ranged from the good to the bad to the downright ugly and so much of it is still unprocessed in my head.
Twitter used to be a place where I could go to either work shit out (with and without interaction with other people) or distract myself from shit I didn’t want to deal with. Then suddenly it became an absolute shit-show of things my brain couldn’t cope with. No matter how many hashtags and keywords I muted, I couldn’t filter it down enough to make it all palatable again. So I just…stopped.
My feed has become auto-posts of blog posts and last.fm stats with the occasional bitchy tweet thrown in for good measure. I’ve whittled my reading list down pretty much to a small collection of musicians and Rooster Teeth and even then I mostly just skim it. I don’t have the mental capacity to deal with it anymore.
It hasn’t been as freeing as it was to quit Facebook. Sometimes I miss the shameless inanity of it all. But the effort it takes to actively think about it is better spent on things that make me feel good to focus on. If I have to force myself to care, it’s no longer worth it.
It’s a lesson I’m constantly relearning…and forgetting.
As to whether I’m completely done with ye olde Twitter…
Probably not quite yet, but…
Time will tell.
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LA Crazy Ingram Hill |