Recently, I did something unprecedented. I went through my Facebook profile and did a cull of all the “friends” I had who I never talked to, who weren’t really involved in my life and who never made regular contact with me. It took me almost 6 hours because Facebook has no function where you can click and delete multiple friends all at once. You have to do it, painstakingly, one “friend” at a time. Do you know why Facebook doesn’t have a function to delete multiple friends? Two reasons… it’s not something that people often do, and Facebook doesn’t want you to do it.
After many hours of mouse-clicking, I went from having 2000 friends down to a much more manageable 100 and, in the process, and over the next few weeks, I discovered something amazing. When you only have real friends on Facebook, Facebook actually becomes a rich and enjoyable online experience. Every post and status update is from or about someone you genuinely care about. The spam is gone. The haters are gone. When I post something, almost 100% of my friends respond somehow. Why? Because they are my real friends!
It got me thinking… what on Earth was I using Facebook for up until this point? Why did I allow myself to accumulate so many “hangers-on,” half-friends, acquaintances and even people I don’t even know? The answer occurred to me a little while later when my wife mentioned that she had noticed on her Facebook news feed that such-and-such a person was off on another amazing holiday adventure and was posting all kinds of paraphernalia about just how wonderful a time they were having. My wife then added… “We should go on a holiday like that.”
The penny dropped.
What is Facebook really about, or at least what is it predominately used for by many people? The marketing of self.
I, like many people, had been using Facebook to shamelessly market my self to the world. I am the product, and I am trying to sell you the belief that my life is fun, interesting, happy, satisfying and enviable. I post all the best aspects of my life to convince my old high school buddies when they ask, “I wonder what he is doing these days?” that I really have it made. In Facebook land, we have great holidays, we eat delicious food, our kids are well behaved and adorable, our Dog doesn’t poop on the carpet and our house is always immaculate. My Facebook life is a catalog of the best of me… the parts of me I want the world to know and see and mercifully, everything else remains hidden.
And this is the problem with Facebook, and all social media really. While we continue to use it to market ourselves, it will never be real. When was the last time you saw someone post, “Just made a really bad decision,” or “Had a fight with my wife” or “I am so sick of my parental responsibilities, I just want to run away?” When was the last time someone posted a picture of themselves with early-morning bed hair in tracksuit pants? You know why this doesn’t happen? Because, when your social media life is a catalog you use sell yourself, you only put up the photos and posts that make you appealing to the rest of the world. This is what marketing is.
The end result? People feel like their life is dull and boring compared to everyone else without, all the while, realizing that the other people with the supposedly more interesting lives feel exactly the same way.
Not me though.
I made a decision to give up that game. I refuse to make myself a product anymore. From now on, I’m going to ditch the marketing campaign and use Facebook to cultivate genuine friendships with people who really matter to me.
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A version of this post was previously published on Medium and is republished here with permission from the author.
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Photo credit: istockphoto