Deactivated

This morning I did what I had been considering for a long time. Like ripping off a Band-Aid, I finally deactivated Facebook.

Yes, like virtually everyone else, I can say that Facebook is making me dumb. It's wasting my time, keeping me from doing things I could be doing that are way more productive, like exercising or getting my news from an actual newspaper rather than from my politically active friends' status updates. This is all true.

But the main reason I deactivated, which I will only share with those few of you who even know about the existence of this blog, is that I am tired of all the babies on Facebook. In keeping with my last post, I am tired of people's sonogram pictures as their profile pictures, updates about their babies' every moves in their status updates, complaints about being pregnant, and baby-belly photos of people who I frankly (in the worst part of myself) can't understand why they deserve to procreate and I do not.

So, if you used to be friends with me on Facebook and I no longer appear in your list of friends, never fear. I still like you, and my husband I are still married (though he is now simply listed as "married" instead of specifically married to me, a fact even he does not yet realize [that I will share with him after he wakes up from his nap]).

It's not that I'm not happy for my genuinely close friends and family who recently had babies or who are currently pregnant. I'm thrilled for them, and I want to share their happiness over email, over the phone and in person, and I do. I'm amazed by friends who had babies recently and then give up two straight hours to talk to me over the phone while their baby sleeps. But I really couldn't care less about the girl I vaguely know from work or from middle school who's about to pop one out. And such knowledge is simply not good for my psyche, nor is it good for my time management. Like one of my closest friends recently said to me over a tear-filled dinner, the problem with Facebook is that it's a place where your 300 "closest friends" post only the happy stuff about their lives -- their recent trips, new job offers or promotions, house purchases, pregnancies, births, dog adoptions, TV show and book recommendations, latest business ventures. No one posts about their most recent miscarriage, their impending divorce, their heart-breaking layoff. It gives us all a false sense that everyone else's lives are perfect and only our own contains stress and anxiety and disappointment.

So, goodbye Facebook. Maybe now I can, ironically, be surrounded by more positive energy than I ever was through everyone's overly positive status updates.