Break From Blogging and Facebook

It's obviously been long enough without a post that this blog has inevitably fallen off your list of sites-to-frequent-often. I'm declaring a hiatus from blogging, similar to the hiatus I took from Facebook. It was enough to break the habit, the compulsive need to check Facebook constantly, the need to make sure I didn't miss anything. I found I was filling precious time just reading status updates of people that I don't have any kind of personal relationship with, old friends that drifted apart naturally or mutual friends of friends that shared a real conversation or met in a coffee shop once. It was difficult to sift through all that information. Yes, there is the "hide" feature, but how do you censor your life like that? You can't simply mute people in real-life... and if I needed to do that on Facebook, it convicted me that it was unnecessary and almost inhumane. Real people were being reduced to 1's and 0's to sort through and categorize. All the while, more and more of my energy was spent on creating the perfect picture of myself to present. Just the right profile picture—something a little artsy, but not too serious as to be pretentious. Make sure to keep the status updates flowing, preferably something ambiguous, but clever—the more comments I could draw, the more important and valued I felt. But it's so deceitful! Comments rarely contained anything worthwhile, just drive-by remarks or the proverbial "high-five" in the form of a Like. All the while, I spent more and more time trying to illicit a continual flow of cyber-affirmation, which fails to substitute for an in-person conversation over coffe, or laughing til your sides hurt during a movie with a good friend or posing a real heart-level question that can only be answered with the silent companionship of someone who understands.

I'm not at all saying Facebook is evil. I'm sure many of you reading this could offer warranted critiques that I'm throwing out the baby with the bathwater or that I shouldn't be so quick to write off internet communications as a valid medium of connection. And I wouldn't—for you or someone you know. For me, and for how I was using Facebook, it was narcissistic on my part and simply took time away from the people around me in real life.

And so, that brings me back to blogging. Until I feel like I have uncluttered my life enough to have the extra time to write, I don't want to waste your time with partially thought-out ramblings. You have enough information in a day to sort through, categorize, process and consume. We're all busy. I'd rather have a phone conversation with the 14 of you (followers of this blog) every once in a while, than try to keep this blog "current" by impersonally divulging myself out-of-context of the relationship that we have.

I am learning that, in some sense, we only exist in relation to each other. The internet has created this pseudo-reality where we can exist and project ourselves out of that context, as individuals. We can craft this identity that has no real traction to anything or anyone. It's just this idea of ourselves that we're trying to construct. And I think by doing so, we're slowly robbing ourselves of the ability to love each other and be truly human. At least, I was. So I'm giving this blog a rest. Let's talk soon instead...