There’s no doubt about it: my Facebook newsfeed is full of old people, and I’m not loving it.
Somewhere between 2007 and today, my Facebook friends stopped posting pictures of themselves in bikinis on the beach. They stopped sharing drunken photos from last night’s party. They stopped sharing videos of their weekend skydiving attempts.
When it first came out, Facebook was full of fun and games. I was young. It was young. Everything was new, wild, and unserious.
As I’ve gotten more mature, so have the people I follow on the platform, and so have their interests. My Facebook friends now post pictures from their wedding shoot. They share videos of their babies. They ask me to sign their online petitions.
It’s all very adult.
The utility and demographic of Facebook seems to have changed, and so has the type of content that is popular. It isn’t the cool young hangout it used to be.
How did this happen?
My mom is here.
Well, maybe it started with the fact that, for the last several years, my mother has been on Facebook and she has been very active. She posts daily memes, photos, and videos. She comments on politics, she debates things with her friends, and sometimes she accidentally posts fake news.
She’s freewheeling.
She is much busier on the platform than me, and her presence online serves as a constant reminder that the life of this one retired senior citizen is far more of a party than my own.
I have a lot of Facebook unfriends.
I’ve also noticed something interesting about my newsfeed. I’ve realized that I dislike approximately 30% of my Facebook friends.
There was a time, in the beginning, when I added anyone and everyone to my friend list. Did I meet you at work? You’re added. Did I meet you at a bar? You’re added. Did I pass by you on the street? No problem, you’re added.
Nowadays, I’m left with a huge number of people on my friend’s list, many of which I don’t particularly like, for one reason or another.
I feel a bit guilty about that, actually. What do you do when it’s too awkward to unfriend someone but too annoying to have them on your page?
Easy. You go to your settings and ignore their posts. This is a short term solution to a long term problem, I know.
I have a lot of Facebook strangers.
Of the remaining people on my list, a good 40% of them are people that I haven’t seen in about 10 years. By the way, we weren’t that close back then either.
They seem nice enough, but it’s hard for me to feel a real sense of connection to an acquaintance who I haven’t seen in a decade.
In some ways, I feel as if my Facebook affiliation with these folks is voyeuristic, as I may never meet them again. We’re just watching each other online. How weird will it be, in 30 years, if these people are still only connected to me through Facebook?
Me watching them. Them watching me. Facebook watching us both.
Big brother is watching.
Facebook can already be a bit of a creepy hangout.
When I decide to go onto Amazon and look up the price of a kettle, Facebook will try to sell that to me later. If I search for information on my local gym, Facebook tries to sell me a membership.
Once, when I was lying in bed beside my wife, and I mentioned that we needed to get a new mattress, Facebook showed me a mattress that was on sale.
How did it do that?
Advertisements have become so prevalent in my newsfeed that sometimes it’s hard to discern what is a post and what is an ad.
The cool kids don’t hang out here anymore
Yesterday, I found out that the younger people in my family barely even use Facebook. They aren’t on Whatsapp either.
They’re out having the time of their lives on Snapchat, Tik Tok, and Instagram. Every now and then, like the biblical Prodigal Son, they’ll come back to Facebook to see what’s up.
They never stay long. They’ll hang around for a few minutes to see which old fogies have wished them a happy birthday on their profile, they won’t respond, and then they’ll head quietly back to where all their friends hang out. That’s where they’ll find all the real fun.
Facebook, to them, is like going to a church social event: It’s fine. It’s just not cool.
A new reason for being
I’m reminded that churches these days are struggling to get younger patrons too. The seniors are still going, but what happens when they all pass away? It’s the same thing with Facebook. Will it exist once I’m gone?
Maybe this relic of my youth is turning into my online senior’s home. One day my kids will visit me here, but they won’t stay. They’ll be pleased that I’m keeping busy. They’ll tell their Tik Tok friends that I’m doing well.
When I was younger, and we would have family friends over for dinner, sometimes my parents would show them old photo albums, and they would flip through the pages much too slowly for my liking. My parents and their friends would love seeing those old pictures, but I remember being incredibly bored.
Those photo albums were so uncool to me. I realize now that Facebook is the online reincarnation of those old photo albums. Interesting to adults. Boring to kids.
That’s just it, I suppose. Facebook is now for adults. It used to be for kids but, over the years, it has morphed into a hangout for grown-ups.
So why did I even expect young people to want to spend time on Facebook in the first place?
They shouldn’t want to. It’s not for them anymore. The young people of today should be trailblazers, not followers.
There are far more interesting things being developed and created for them every day.
Like we did when we were young, they should go out and explore everything that the world has to offer. They shouldn’t have to stick to something that was created by their parents.
And just like it has been from the beginning of time, this new generation of kids will find something amazing that is even better than what we older people had before. If history is any indication, the older generation will follow them to that amazing new thing, and then will probably take it over.
At that point, it will be our job, as members of that older generation, to do everything in our power to avoid ruining it.
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This post was previously published on Medium.com.
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Photo credit: Felix Rostig on Unsplash