About three day ago, I executed a highly motivated operation that I like to call "Operation F Facebook". The F stands for a particularly choosy swear word and I don't think it is appropriate for me to type it in these "family friendly" blog posts of mine. I deleted my Facebook profile.
Facebook has become such a (useless but) integral part of our lives that I feel like I have committed some great deed. It has become a way for people who don't care for each other to become friends. It has become a platform for people to show off, show case and share stuff.
I myself have been a member of Facebook since 2008. I dabbled initially, not really caring for it. Then it grew on me and I must admit that I was "addicted". For about the past year, I had become increasingly disillusioned with it. I was just whiling away time and reading the useless statuses of people I didn't even want to know and a lot other such things.
In the meantime, experiments with Twitter and Google+ had failed miserably and I decided to delete both accounts barely a few weeks into them. But Facebook was an old habit. And it was rather more difficult to kill it.
Let me tell you what led me to perform this action of deleting my FB account. I saw a photo posted by one of my "friends". He was "helping" a beggar, giving him some food. The Prophet said in Khalil Gibran's book that "charity is an act which not even your most beloved people know of". These words have great meaning (as does every verse in the great book).
But the fact that this person had uploaded a photo of him "helping" a poor man, just so that he would get some "likes" to the photo and just so that he will have gained some respect in the minds of his "friends" just disgusted me. I felt repulsed by the whole thing. It was just too much to take.
It then occurred to me that people these days think about everything in their life from the perspective of a Facebook status or a photo or a profile picture. They only care about the things that will help them to get "likes". Such has become the purpose of human life. We have so much time and so little to do. I felt like that I had played enough part in this whole process.
In a final act of glory before the death of my online self, I put up a status a couple of hours before i deleted my account, saying that "These days, there are no good deeds. The only "good deeds" are done so that they can be posted on FB to amass "likes". What a pathetic age indeed. And please, do me a favour and dont "like" this status or whatever."
Feeling proud that I had asked people to NOT like my status, giving them a couple of hours' time to let them know what I now think of the social networking world, I then deleted my account. Facebook really tried to hold on to me. It pleaded with me, saying my "friends" were gonna miss me. Haha! I will continue to meet my real friends in the real world, the others have never really been friends of mine.
And thus, in an age where thousands of people are joining Facebook every minute, I proudly decided to go the other way. Considering that this is my second major "dropping out" in just about a year (the first being dropping out of engineering), I feel like a hippie now.
Update 1: In the past few days, though I have felt some moments of temptation, I can confidently say that I have flushed out this addiction from my body! Cheers!
Facebook has become such a (useless but) integral part of our lives that I feel like I have committed some great deed. It has become a way for people who don't care for each other to become friends. It has become a platform for people to show off, show case and share stuff.I myself have been a member of Facebook since 2008. I dabbled initially, not really caring for it. Then it grew on me and I must admit that I was "addicted". For about the past year, I had become increasingly disillusioned with it. I was just whiling away time and reading the useless statuses of people I didn't even want to know and a lot other such things.
In the meantime, experiments with Twitter and Google+ had failed miserably and I decided to delete both accounts barely a few weeks into them. But Facebook was an old habit. And it was rather more difficult to kill it.
Let me tell you what led me to perform this action of deleting my FB account. I saw a photo posted by one of my "friends". He was "helping" a beggar, giving him some food. The Prophet said in Khalil Gibran's book that "charity is an act which not even your most beloved people know of". These words have great meaning (as does every verse in the great book).
But the fact that this person had uploaded a photo of him "helping" a poor man, just so that he would get some "likes" to the photo and just so that he will have gained some respect in the minds of his "friends" just disgusted me. I felt repulsed by the whole thing. It was just too much to take.
It then occurred to me that people these days think about everything in their life from the perspective of a Facebook status or a photo or a profile picture. They only care about the things that will help them to get "likes". Such has become the purpose of human life. We have so much time and so little to do. I felt like that I had played enough part in this whole process.
In a final act of glory before the death of my online self, I put up a status a couple of hours before i deleted my account, saying that "These days, there are no good deeds. The only "good deeds" are done so that they can be posted on FB to amass "likes". What a pathetic age indeed. And please, do me a favour and dont "like" this status or whatever."
Feeling proud that I had asked people to NOT like my status, giving them a couple of hours' time to let them know what I now think of the social networking world, I then deleted my account. Facebook really tried to hold on to me. It pleaded with me, saying my "friends" were gonna miss me. Haha! I will continue to meet my real friends in the real world, the others have never really been friends of mine.
And thus, in an age where thousands of people are joining Facebook every minute, I proudly decided to go the other way. Considering that this is my second major "dropping out" in just about a year (the first being dropping out of engineering), I feel like a hippie now.
Update 1: In the past few days, though I have felt some moments of temptation, I can confidently say that I have flushed out this addiction from my body! Cheers!
Inspired! gathering guts to perform the feat! :D
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