Why It's So Hard to Delete your Facebook Friends

Hey! Look at me! I'm at the beach! Yeah yeah!

I was reading an article the other day about Facebook and how artificial it is. Everyone's life is perfect and people are always trying to one up each other. You feel like the people who aren't posting have crappy lives and are secretly spying on you, wishing their lives were as cool as your own. The guy in the article said he went from 600 plus friends, to just 50 friends. He kept people he actually knew and spoke to.

Before I read that article, I was sitting at about 250 something friends. Not nearly as much as his 600 (I don't even think I know 600 people, much less have them on my Facebook), but I thought it was time for a Facebook cleanse. I post a lot. Like, a lot. Probably close to 4-7 times a week. That's plenty considering I'm no longer in my 20s posting every single thing that happens in my life. But I love taking pictures and I love George Takei and I love Mashable articles. Plus I'm in communications which means I'm on Facebook ALL day. So I'm constantly reading junk. All day.

Creeper

 

But every now and then, I'll post a photo of myself. Or I'll check into a place if it's the first time I've been there. Every now and then, I get someone liking my photo that I've literally not spoken to since high school. Which is around the same time Buffy was in high school, and if you don't get that reference, you clearly didn't go to high school in the 90s. So there's a bit of a creep factor, especially when I didn't really speak to so and so during the time we knew each other. So basically, they friended me and I was too afraid to click ignore.

As I was scrolling through my list, there were these people who I don't speak to in real life, that I would have deleted, but I found myself being worried about their feelings. Deleting a friend off of Facebook is like saying, I HATE YOU. Well, not really, but speaking from experience, it sometimes feels that way. Some of these people I was considering to delete don't even live on the same continent as me. I will never ever bump into these people randomly to have that awkward conversation about why I chose to delete them from my friend list. They don't have my email address. They don't have my number. They have no other way of contacting me.

Shut Up and Delete Them Already!

So why was I so hesitant to delete them? Do I really care about what these people think?

I'm guilty of food porn. But which of my 250 friends actually care?

And that my friends, is the problem with Facebook. I DO care about what these people think. As a person who's invested so much time on the social network, it's so hard to break up with these people. So instead, I found myself deleting people who are never on Facebook and who I never speak to ON Facebook. It was easier to press the delete when I knew they probably wouldn't notice any ways. And really, if you are logging on everyday and not making yourselves known, that's just creepy Facebook behaviour. I'd at least like to know who might be seeing the photo I posted yesterday. I nearly forgot I had some of these people on my friend list.

I shaved off about 20 people from my list. Not a lot, but maybe I'll go back and it'll get easier. Do I really need the person I used to work with for a few months in that temp job I had 8 years ago seeing my posts? No. But they were such nice people. Danget. There I go again.