Facebook Isn’t Where Your Friends Are
By: Michelle Elizabeth
Tags: Advice, This Happened To Me, Life Lessons, Self Improvement, Social Media

I had a realization a while ago. It was after an incident where a few of my “friends” went behind my back and decided not to invite me out with them. They did as most women do on Facebook and posted everything about it. They even went so far as to caption it with a few sentences that not only hurt my feelings but made me realize that there aren’t any real friends on Facebook.

I wanted to comment. I desperately fought the urge to write something snarky about the fact that they were all professing to be best friends and coworkers. I wasn’t there, wasn’t even invited. But instead of showing them how hurt I was, I unfriended every single one of them.

A couple of months later, at an event they all invited me to, it was announced that oversight had happened, and they forgot to invite one of their clique to the BBQ. The host told everyone not to post pictures of the event online, so we didn’t hurt her feelings.

I thought back to what had happened to me and realized that no one thought twice about hurting my feelings. I felt justified in cutting them all off. They clearly didn’t view me as a friend, so why should I let them be apart of my life online if they’re not willing to include me off it?

It made me wonder, why did they friend request me in the first place if they didn’t see me as a friend?

We all come to Facebook for different reasons. I initially joined because I had moved away from my hometown. I wanted to keep in touch with my friends from high school that I wouldn’t see anymore. But calling them friends is a stretch.

Most of these women I hadn’t talked to in over ten years. They didn’t even know my mom had passed, that I had gotten married, or had kids. I wasn’t even a blip on their radar, and yet I hit request friend, and to my surprise, they accepted.

As my friend list swelled to over four hundred people, I couldn’t help but wonder, if I have so many friends, then why am I so lonely? Why does my phone never ring?

The answer was a simple one. There are no friends on Facebook.

I have a few close friends and family that are on Facebook. Every once in a while, they will connect with me. They are the phone calls I receive around the holidays and my birthday. They are the people I reach out to when I’m lonely. But if I whittled my friends list down to those people, it would go from four hundred to maybe fifteen, and I think I’m being generous.

But I still wanted an answer to the question of why people friend people on Facebook that they’re not even friends with?

I couldn’t understand the psychology behind it, especially with those people who never really spoke to me in high school or college. Those people that knew of me or vaguely remembered that we were in orchestra together. Why were those people on my friends list?

A deep dive on Google gave me all the answers I needed. There are no friends on Facebook. The acquaintances who friended me did so for a variety of reasons. I know when I request someone, it comes from a place of wanting to see what they’re up to. I have no intention of reconnecting with them. I want to see what kind of life they’re living and see how it measures up to mine. And I’m not alone in this. The New York Times did a study on it.

A whopping 68% of the study respondents are only on Facebook to present a particular image of themselves. It’s all about how people see them. When my coworkers friended me on Facebook, it was not only because they wanted to peer into my life but because they wanted to show off theirs. They never had any intention of making me a part of the group.

Another 78% only share information on Facebook because it allows them to stay connected with people they wouldn’t otherwise stay connected with in real life. Which led me to the question, if you’re not willing to include them in your real life, why connect with them in the first place? The answer is an easy one, to show off.

Facebook should be called Fakebook instead. We have all these people posting representations of lives that don’t exist. With all their #blessed and #couplegoals, you wonder how many of those people consider themselves as happy as their posts portray them to be. Or are we all just day drinkers, silently crying in our showers because we feel so alone but yet are posting about our perfect relationships that are nonexistent offline?

It makes you wonder why we’re all so happy living in this lie. I didn’t want to do it anymore. I started to unfriend people that weren’t friends with me in real life. Some people noticed right away and sent me a request back. They didn’t ask why they had been unfriended. They just wanted to reconnect. I thought it was weird that they wanted to be re-friended, but I did so anyway. They had never reached out in real life, so I just assumed maybe they enjoyed my content.

The vast majority of the people I unfriended either didn’t notice or didn’t care enough to re-friend me back. And to be honest, there were a few of those that stung a bit. But when you unfriend three hundred people, you’ll find out soon enough who your real friends are.

Then there were a bunch of people I couldn’t unfriend because we either work together or know mutual people. Unfriending them would make things awkward, mainly if the content was discussed that they didn’t see and wondered why. This is the reason I stopped oversharing my life.

I used to be one of those people that posted everything about my life online. I told myself I did it to keep my family and friends in the loop, but it wasn’t. I was just another one of those people using social media as a constant brag fest. It was all “look at me and see what I’m doing isn’t my life better than yours.” That’s the truth behind why we all post. Facebook turned life into a contest, and no one is #winning.

It wasn’t easy to stop oversharing. I had cultivated a habit that everywhere I went, I had to take a picture and post it. Yes, even to the supermarket, I had to post what I bought. Who cares? But it was all about the image I wanted to present to all the “friends” that followed me. I wanted them all to see I was living my best life, too, and that I was just as good as they were.

I had to stop and ask myself, did I care what they thought of me and my life?

After I got past my competitive nature of always having to win, I discovered that I didn’t care. That my life didn’t need to be an open book to the people who only seemed to show concern when I was down. They never seemed to like any of my positive posts. But let something horrible happen, and they were right there to get the scoop. If I wouldn’t want them to know in real life, then I needed to stop sharing it online.

I stopped comparing and posting pictures of my life. I still get on and scroll, but it doesn’t affect me in the same way it did before. Because I know that their lives aren’t as perfect as the pictures and posts would have you believe. No one has an ideal partner because people are human. No one has a perfect life for the same reason. Everyone has good times, and the bad times get hidden behind the fake smiles.

Once I let go of my Facebook habit, I became a much happier person. I removed everyone whose content didn’t bring me joy. All of the people I felt the need to compare myself to, I unfriended or hid. I don’t care about what’s going on in their false representations of their lives. I stay focused on what I’m doing, and I don’t feel the need to share it anymore for validation.

It took me a year to completely detox from Facebook. But the process made me a better person who has more time to focus on the things and people that truly matter.