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Facebook, the social media website that continues to treat its users like rotting garbage, has a bad habit of destroying your psychological well being. Either through the proliferation of fake news or the constant pressure to create and maintain “friendships”, Facebook is destroying your mind. Picking it apart like seagulls fighting over a french fry.
The first thing you must realize about Facebook, and social media in general, is that these people are not your friends. Sure, some of them might be, or may have been or might be in the future. But thinking that the several hundred people listed as such are anything more than names and faces on a web-page is delusional. You have a closer relationship with that empty jar of mayonnaise.
Second, Facebook fucks with your head by forcing you to acknowledge these people on a near daily basis with notifications either about their activities or their stupid birthdays. I’m not even going to get into Google adding all their goddamn birthdays to my calendar. It’s easy to generally ignore the activity of others, but because of our parents and social norms, it’s hard to ignore them on their birthday. So we type an empty message of faux happiness into the little box and move on, feeling some sort of weird self-satisfaction because we typed “happy birthday you” to a veritable stranger.
Regardless, it’s another addiction we are seemingly more than happy to feed. Not me. Not anymore. By this point, I’ve posted either a blasé or annoyingly complex birthday message to every single person I’m connected to on Facebook. It doesn’t need to happen any longer. No one really cares.
Outside of a select few people, I really don’t give a flying dick knuckle about your fucking age, nor do you mine. I give a shit about what being connected to you can do for me, as do you. I give a shit about the people I connect with in real life, who deserve more for their existence than a once-a-year hollow message on their Facebook timeline.
This might seem aggressive, and it is. Facebook has warped our sense of reality, of sharing, and what we should consider sacred to our personal lives. While I have been slowly deleting all content from my Facebook timeline, I realize that not many people will do the same. But one thing you can do is use the platform as something separate from yourself. Post memes. Post music. Share content, but keep your personal life, well, personal. Your birthday should be celebrated by those who actually care, rather than by a bunch of strangers.
Let’s be honest, if Facebook needed to remind me it was your birthday — acquaintance, business contact, friend or family member — then I really didn’t give a whole slice of creamy feces about it in the first place. And I would expect nothing less from the lot of you.
Where do you stand? Do you wish your Facebook stranger-friends a happy birthday? Let us know down below in the comments or carry the discussion over to our Twitter or Facebook.
Editors’ Recommendations:
- Facebook might be moving messaging back to the main app
- Instagram is finally trying to clean your feed of sexually suggestive content
- Twitter will now allow for faster suspension appeals within the app
- Instagram handles are replacing phone numbers as our primary contact info
- LinkedIn is adding reactions, because honestly, why not
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