So I've made it to the final week of Lent and I must say I am quite proud of myself. I'm not a Catholic but I like the idea behind giving up something to get closer to God or to just see if you really need that thing. Over the years I've given up soda, sweets, french fries, etc... and this year I thought I'd try something different and give up Twitter and Facebook. I think I underestimated myself a lot because I thought I'd be going insane by the 2nd or 3rd day but now that its day 35 I am actually quite proud of myself. So below are some of the things I learned while taking a break from social networking.
1. God has a HILARIOUS sense of humor! The things I've seen and heard during this little break is the stuff great tweets are made of! I have witnessed and overheard some of the craziest shit I've ever experienced in all my 26 years and had NO means to share it with the world!
2. When you're standing in line, waiting on a friend, etc... and you can't get on FB or Twitter times can get tough. I never realized how much I rely on FB and Twitter to pretend like I'm doing something and that way I don't have to engage with people around me. Not having that to fall back on kind of forced me to actually talk to people and that brings me to my 3rd point.
3. I spent a lot of time tweeting about things that I could have been experiencing. I think this is something that you honestly can't understand until you spend a significant amount of time away from both sites. It was so interesting how after a couple of weeks I started to realize that I was paying more attention to things around me and experiencing more when I didn't have my head down tweeting.
4. It's very hard to get information when you're not on Twitter. People can say what they want about the site but it is honestly the best way to get the most up to date information. I didn't find out Nate Dogg died until 2 days after it happened because I didn't get to see the millions of tweets about it! It's also so hard to get together with all my peeps without being able to just tweet them all and find out our plans. Texting people just seemed so archaic after using Twitter for as long as I did.
5. I was pleasantly surprised with how fantastic some of my "online friends" were during my hiatus. A couple of yall ended up checking out this blog or my Tumblr since I wasn't on Twitter or Facebook and I got a lot of texts from people too. Also, the art of texting and emailing was brought back into my life as a means to keep in touch with some of my friends. However, I also discovered some of the people I actually consider close friends kind of disappeared when I wasn't on Twitter or Facebook. I consider this to be a good thing though because I am not a fan of putting in all the work into a friendship and I've realized it's time to peace out some people.
6. I NEED Facebook when I'm doing my 007 work! Ha, it's not as sketchy as it sounds. I simply like to do investigative research on people sometimes and I do that research via FB! This was actually the only time I really missed FB. I honestly think I could do without it in my life and shall consider deleting it.
All in all I'd say that what I learned the most is that in those times of boredom it's really nice to have FB or Twitter to play with. I think it's less of an addiction as something to do. My roommate was saying that she could totally do it because she wasn't addicted and I had to explain to her that I wasn't addicted either but it would be nice to be able to sit on the couch and scroll through FB when I'm bored (which she was actually doing at the time). I think that helped her get the picture. It's just a nice way to pass the time and without it I had to find other ways to entertain myself. I've read way more books, emailed/texted with a lot more people, and just relaxed and enjoyed myself a lot more. I think this was a good little experiment for me because I'm now going to make a conscious effort to spend less time on those sites. That being said I'm VERYYYYYYY excited to get back Sunday!!! 5 more days!
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