My Social Disconnect

Last week, I posted a Facebook status to say that I’m deactivating my account. I have a lot of reasons for making that decision, and I’d like to touch on a couple of them here.

The first reason is to devote more time to my freelance business, as well as my creative writing. That may seem an odd choice, since so many “experts” tell writers they need a robust online presence to succeed in today’s writing industry. However, a writer needs something to promote, and I find that too much of my creative writing time is spent surfing the web or liking posts on Facebook. I start researching for my novel, and then get sucked down a rabbit hole. As a result, my novel sits waiting for attention. Until it’s completed, building an online presence is the cart before the horse.

In addition, I haven’t given enough attention to marketing and growing my freelance business in recent months. True, I have some steady clients; however, I’m the kind of person who needs new challenges and opportunities to learn new skills. I haven’t done enough with that recently, and it’s time to shake off the rust and learn something new.

Perhaps the biggest reason for the change is that I want a more authentic connection with the people in my life. Yes, Facebook makes it easy to bridge the miles, but how “real” are the interactions through it?

When I was a kid, I lived 13 miles from the town where I went to school. Most of that distance was over unpaved roads, and we were too far from the township limits to be on its water or phone networks. Since this was in Arizona’s Sonoran desert, we didn’t have a water well on the property, so my family hauled water to store in tanks for household use. That practice always made me a little “odd” in the eyes of my classmates.

The bigger oddity, however, was our lack of a telephone. This was the 1980s, when kids were glued to the phone during the summer, and really fortunate kids had their own phone lines in their rooms. Since we didn’t have a phone at all, I was often cut off from the ever-changing social circle during the summer months. While that made the start of each school year difficult (since I had to “remake” my friends each year), I learned to treasure those friends who would write me letters during the summer. I came to appreciate the importance of a personal connection as represented by an envelope in the mail.

Those experiences have prompted me to log off of Facebook so I can connect more personally with the people I care about. I know it takes two to tango, so this experiment will only work if my friends and extended family reply to my emails, phone calls and letters. Since I recognize that keeping in touch without Facebook may be challenging, I expect I’ll reactivate my account at some point. I’m hoping to stick with this experiment at least until the new year. We’ll see if that works or not.

During my Facebook experiment, I’ll still be regularly posting to both this personal blog and my business blog. Hopefully, the quality of my writing will improve if I have more time to think and write about the issues that matter to me.