Adios, Facebook

This morning I deactivated my Twitter account, after receiving an email that another random person I don't know was watching my "tweets". By the way, I haven't "tweeted" since May of 2010, and only think about Twitter whenever these random notification emails come my way.

I've been pondering doing the same with my Facebook account for quite some time, and finally concluded that the New Year is about as good a time as any to resolve to do away with as many distractions in my life as possible and focus on more important things, like say, the real world.

Don't get me wrong, it was highly enjoyable in the beginning, catching up with people from my past (distant and not so much). From time to time I've said prayers for people that have asked for them, for whatever reason. I have flipped through pictures of people's vacations to random locations, exotic, or otherwise. I've even gone so far as to engage in online chatting with a few of them.

But then I got sucked into playing some of the games on there, namely Happy Aquarium. I felt the need to log in at least twice a day to make sure my tank was clean and my fake fish weren't suffering unnecessarily. This lead to playing another online game non-related to Facebook that took more time away from doing more important things. After a number of months I recognized how much time I was wasting, and ceased doing them entirely. That was a little over a year ago.

And still I periodically logged in to look at people's dogs, relatives I've never met myself, nor will I ever. I read about people's beef with this politician, or this other person, or problems with their neighbors, problems with their spouses, problems with life in general. I started blogging less often because it was so much easier to just upload photos to Facebook and add one line blurbs about where I was, who I was standing there in the picture with, and what I was doing.

I've missed blogging, whether anyone reads what I say here or not, I've missed it. I work from home in a vacuum the majority of the time, and to me, expressing my thoughts here seems a little more sane than talking to myself. I tend to make more of an effort to share a story with a picture here than I would on Facebook.

I'm quite honestly tired of doing something because everyone else is. I realize that blogging is probably so 2006, but I don't care. For the same reason my favorite band to listen to is Voivod. Never heard of them? Good, that's how I like it.

This is not a formal declaration that I'm officially becoming a hermit. I'd love to hear from anyone that wants to "chat me up", but I'm tired of doing it on some billionaire's mind numbing website.

Facebook, I may be back some day, or find a need to log back into your site again, but for my sanity's sake, I hope not. This is one New Year's resolution that I think I'll be keeping.