A Farewell To Facebook, Reason #3: Obsession & Stupidity

This is the last in my posts about why I left Facebook.

No, really, I promise!

Like many things I write, they’ve come off a bit as “explanation” and/or “justification,” but– also like many things I write– they were meant more as “exploration.” They are a personal exploration, through writing, of my own decisions and motivations. That is what writing is to me. That ability to use it as a forum, not with others, but with myself. It’s as much an internal dialog as an external representation. It is more-so that, actually.

And that’s the point of this post.

Longform writing

I’m going to be honest with myself and not describe the way I like to write as “essay.” It often doesn’t have the deep research and editing that such writing would require. Still, it is longform writing. It’s not sound bites, it’s analysis. It allows me– forces me, really– to dive deeply into myself to ascertain my own thoughts and motivations. Whether I’m writing about myself, or about someone else, or about some arbitrary situation removed from me completely. Writing is analysis.

Facebook is not writing as analysis. Facebook is a focus on the soundbite. Facebook is a headline. Headlines are catchy. They are short and pithy. Headlines grab people’s attention, and Facebook is really good at that. But that was the limit. Longform writing is the actual story, and I truly believe in “story.”

Longform writing is what I want to do, but Facebook writing is what I did.

Strangely, I would find that I was spending almost as much time internally preparing a Facebook post as I would spend preparing a longform blog post such as this. And no, that’s not to say that I spend only a few minutes preparing a blog post. What that means is that a stupid Facebook post would take, quite literally, days to prepare.

Just think for a moment about how incredibly fucking stupid that is.

I mean, seriously, did you read the previous posts where I describe how I don’t take Facebook seriously? Good. So I’m not the other one who realizes that I’m completely full of shit. I take it too fucking seriously!

A day to swim, a week to post about it

Think about this small post:

The Hood River pool, where you learn that no matter how out of shape you thought you were, you’re more out of shape than that.

Which took me almost a week to write. Yes, you read that correctly, almost a week.

I’ve written before about trying to learn how to swim with the masters swimmers. It’s difficult, but it’s also amazing who’s there. There are 60+ year old women who, despite my best efforts at focusing on what I’m doing, I can’t help but notice are really in shape and… well… hot! There are people who are so in shape and so good in the water that it’s difficult to believe that I’ll ever be that good.

So, I’m there watching people who I can’t help but compare myself to– me, this former martial arts loving competitive cyclist who is now little more than an out-of-shape middle-aged oaf. I watch them while meanwhile I can barely make it back and forth across the pool once before I’m out of breath and dizzy enough to pass out.

And there’s this aspect of body preparedness, which I’ve never thought of, but which explains why I can get on a bicycle after two years of doing basically no riding, and still hold my own in the Tour de Hood. It’s the reason I keep thinking of myself as “fairly fit” despite all the evidence to the contrary. It’s not that I’m “fit.” It’s just that my body, after an entire lifetime of doing this sport, is uniquely prepared to, well, do this sport.

But any other sport is up for grabs. I can ride 40 miles at the drop of a hat, but jogging around the block is deadly, and swimming kicks my ass.

That’s a sampling of the analysis I did before writing that Facebook post. It’s a sampling of what I wanted to write about. But, of course, on Facebook, you’re not going to write all of that. So, I took a couple days thinking about that, then a couple more deciding whether I was going to write about 60 year old women who look hot in bathing suits, and how I could do that in a way that was funny, but still appropriate and respectful to them, and then a while deciding whether I was going to mention body preparedness or just feeling out of shape, and a couple days to…

And what do I get out of that? One fucking sentence that doesn’t express any of that.

Don’t give up writing for writing

Here in Hood River, wind sports are big. The windsurfers and kiteboarders here have a saying: “Don’t give up wind for wind.” There’s a lot I learned from that saying.

Say you’re out on the river, and you have wind, and you’re windsurfing, but then you look way up the gorge and it looks windier. You might be tempted to go there, but you shouldn’t. You have wind here, and you don’t know that the wind is better up there. Furthermore, even if it is better up there, by the time you get off the water, break down, get there, rig up, and get back on the water, that wind could be gone. That wind could have left by that time– and the wind you had at the first place could have left too.

Don’t give up wind for wind.

I realized that what I was doing was just that. I was obsessing about posts. Do they capture everything I want them to capture, do they have enough comedy, do they poke at, or not poke at, family members who will be upset, or not upset, at being poked at. I’d spend a week thinking about how I was going to post a short two sentence statement on Facebook, and I found that I had no mental energy for actually writing the longform analysis that I wanted to do, so I didn’t do it. I was doing all the longform analysis for shortform writing.

I gave up writing for writing.

Archery and The Final Twist

But that’s not even the real, really real, reason I gave up Facebook.

I obsessed over Facebook posts. I would literally sit with someone in conversation and think about how I was going to relate that conversation– or maybe even think about how I was going to relate a completely different conversation on Facebook. At the pool, I thought just as much about how I was going to relate my experience at the pool on Facebook as I did about how I was actually experiencing the pool.

I had inklings of this for a while, but it hit home when I was practicing archery one day. Coming from a martial arts background, I have a consciousness of focus and presence. I use that in many things, of course, but I’m more conscious of them when I do martial arts-like things, of which archery is one. So one day, I’m out shooting, and I shoot a really beautiful quiver. I was calm, focused, present, and 5 of 8 arrows are all virtually dead center and spaced about the distance of two quarters. Beautiful.

Now, what I should have done, what I knew I wanted to do, was to ignore those arrows that I’ve already shot. They don’t exist. I needn’t think of the two arrows still in my quiver either, because they don’t exist. The only thing that exists is this arrow I have nocked and the target. There is nothing but this shot. Quiet, peace, breath, and this one shot are all that exist in the world. That is what I should have thought.

But what I did think is this: Wouldn’t it be awesome to post a picture of 8 perfectly shot arrows in the target! I’d love to post that on Facebook.

The next shot I fired was almost a foot off. The shot after that missed the target all together. My final shot even missed my backboard and hit my shed. I realized at that point that I hadn’t given up writing for writing. I’d given up the presence of my life for Facebook.

I unstrung my bow, collected my arrows, came inside, and deleted my account.

A Farewell To Facebook

Me leaving Facebook had nothing to do with the concept of friends, or with the concept of interaction. It had to do with the concept of presence. Specifically, with my inability to have that presence while I was focused on my obsessive, stupid desire to describe that presence to others.

Sure, I think about how I’m going to post something on my blog, but it’s different. I can’t explain how it’s different except to say that when I think about my blog, I don’t actually think about how will I say this on my blog, but rather I think how do I feel about this– and then I write about those feelings on my blog.

Maybe it’s because longform is the process of understanding of how I feel about something, and then the writing of those feelings. It’s focused on the feeling, the understanding. Shortform writing is, for me, often focused on just the writing.

I can’t explain it, really. But I know that when I was standing there with my bow in my hand, looking thirty feet beyond my target at a fletching sticking out of my shed, I wanted to cry. I wanted to cry not because I missed a good shot, or because I missed the opportunity to describe that good shot, but because I was thinking so much about Facebook that I missed the experience of living that shot.

And of so much other living.

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