Sign in. It’s quick, free and it’s up to you.
An account is an optional way to support the work we do. Find out more.
WHAT ARE WE doing with all of the Facebook friends that we have collected over the years? I started my account back in 2008, so I have accumulated a fair amount of stragglers along the way, and now I just don’t know what to do with them.
To be fair, I don’t check Facebook even half as much as I do Instagram or TikTok, and when I log in now, I find that the site has an ‘abandoned amusement park with creaky rides’ kind of a vibe. And yet here I still am, continuing to visit on a regular basis.
So, should I be deleting people I no longer speak to (which would be a solid 99% of my friends list)? Or do I just continue bringing them with me throughout my entire life journey? Why do both options feel so strange?
I know young people now are enjoying calling it ‘Grannybook’ and rolling their eyes at the old Millennials still pottering about on Facebook. I have to point out that in 2008, Facebook was an entirely different world from the one it is today, where the only activity is your parents’ neighbour’s uncle’s cat sharing a post about a dog missing from a village somewhere in Queensland. We didn’t live in a hyper-social-media world with numerous apps back then.
Back in 2008, it was all so new and shiny. We were all adding everyone that we had ever interacted with, poking all the things and uploading 97 photos of a single night out with each person tagged.
It’s hard to describe; you really just had to have been there to understand. It was my Woodstock. You know how now you get a friend suggestion, and it’s someone you have avoided adding for 15 odd years and would rather eat glass than speak to ever again? It was the complete opposite. Plus, the privacy settings were entirely non-existent and we really weren’t aware of or concerned about privacy, so you could see what everyone had been up to, even that absolute gowl from secondary school (turns out she’s still a gowl, but a London gowl now).
And it’s because I spent so much time on it during the glory days I now have the strangest mix of people gathered, people who I might have worked with, or met on holidays, or on a night out, or the girl I lent a hairbrush to in a ladies bathroom one night and she immediately invited me to her wedding. I have friends of friends who I have never met in person, a lady who made a cake for my daughter’s 4th birthday, three women I attended a single self-defence class with back in 2013 and, possibly the strangest of all, a security guard from my local Tesco.
I even once accepted a friend request from someone’s distant aunt, who likely added me by accident, and all of her posts are questions directed to Facebook, asking why it deleted her nephew from her friends list. And, of course, there are some people that I genuinely haven’t a breeze where they came from.
Yet here we all are, together, sharing our lives with one another. You have to admit, there is something beautiful about that. Maybe even poetic. Even if it would give Marie Kondo a proper Menty B (what the kids call a nervous breakdown). It’s chaos and clutter, and I just love it.
I have one friend who ruthlessly culls her friends list with the same energy that the OPW culls the deer in The Phoenix Park, and she says that having a tonne of friends on social media pulls your attention in too many different ways, so this is a way to reclaim her focus.
If she doesn’t speak to someone in a few months, wouldn’t speak to them in person, or wouldn’t even wish them a happy birthday, then they are axed. She once said, ‘Why would I give someone I met once a window into my life?’ But she was speaking to the wrong person when she asked that question, because windows work both ways, and I absolutely adore seeing glimpses of other people’s lives. It’s the equivalent of people watching over a coffee. There is quite possibly nothing like the feeling of seeing the guy we found on the local information page to clean our gutters, post a photo of his daughter’s communion day. I am absolutely thrilled for all of you.
Where some people might be burdened by a frenzied news feed, I feel like the clutter is my weighted security blanket. I also love the laziness of social media interactions, where a simple ‘like’ can sustain a friendship for another six years. Lazy communication is my jam. I will like your son’s graduation photos with my whole heart, but I would rather eat glass than talk to you in person about it.
Seeing people in person is entirely overrated. I refuse to make plans for the future because I feel like I am forcing it on future me, and she should be able to decide how she spends her time (she works really hard), but I will support every milestone you reach until one of us dies!
So, sure, I might cross the road to avoid talking to every single one of them, but that doesn’t mean they aren’t important to me. Plus, deleting people feels so rude. I have had people delete me from social media (to be fair, I went through an awful phase of trying to prove that I was still the same person I was before I had kids, when I was at my most insecure), and while I understand it, I’m still salty about it.
I mean, how is my life of such little significance to you that you can just delete me? As if our five-minute interaction eight years ago meant nothing to you? As if my airport check-in from 2021 wasn’t groundbreaking?
Maybe I am holding onto the past, or letting the past hold on to me. Maybe I am clinging to glory days. I don’t know. But if anyone has made it this far with me, I need you to know that you are safe, you’re with me for life. I will like your nursing home selfies, but I’ll still cross the street to avoid you. And I definitely won’t go to your funeral.
Margaret Lynch is a mother of two and is a parenting columnist with The Journal.
To embed this post, copy the code below on your site
have your say