Now, I'm not saying I have everything figured out, nor have I reached some sort of enlightenment. As with making any sort of ongoing change, I have my good days and my bad days. Everyone has those days when you're late because the driveway is buried under feet of snow, when you find out your school tells you that you owe an extra $200, when you get in the wrong line at Wegmans, or when all of these happen at once. It's easy to give in and just spend the day feeling sorry for yourself.
That being said, I want to talk about one of the biggest challenges I face when trying to be more positive and one of the [personally] biggest detriments to a positive attitude, and that, my friends, is social media. I'm not saying someone's Facebook update or their most recent tweet is preventing me from being happy, it's just that it's far too easy to waste time on social media and get caught up in petty drama. Even if I'm having a good day, I can log onto Facebook and see something that will rattle around in the back of my mind for the rest of the day, (maybe I'm obsessive, maybe I'm crazy, or just maybe, this happens to other people too.) We all have those friends that share too much, always post their opinions, are trying to prove something, or are constantly complaining about their lives. In cases like these, it takes copious amounts of self-control for me not to give my two cents, and this results in me dwelling on the topic for far too long, wondering if someone else is going call them out on their pettiness or correct their misinformation.
I'm not going to lie, I derive a great deal of entertainment from the overly-dramatic or the overly opinionated friends I have on Facebook, sometimes it's fun to watch people blow up over seemingly insignificant things. But when we get down to it, who is this really benefitting? Me? No, absolutely not.
I promise all this rambling is leading up to something.
For far too long I've kept people as friends on Facebook because they're petty, overdramatic, or trying to use Facebook as a platform for social justice, and to put it quite simply: I find it entertaining. Another factor that plays into my ongoing virtual friendship with these people is the fear of offending them by removing them from my friend list. Today, I saw a post I viewed as hypocritical (and slightly entertaining,) and spent far too long mulling it over and internally mocking them for being so blind and foolish. A few hours later, while scrolling through my newsfeed, I noticed the same post again, and after a couple seconds of deliberation, simply defriended the individual. Keeping these people on my friend list simply for entertainment, is rude to them and doing me no benefit. After that I decided that I was done keeping people around for entertainment, or for fear of offending them, so I then proceeded to remove a couple other "friends" with whom I have no desire for future contact, and who are as likely as not to notice the fact that I removed them as a friend.
I'm not going to lie, I derive a great deal of entertainment from the overly-dramatic or the overly opinionated friends I have on Facebook, sometimes it's fun to watch people blow up over seemingly insignificant things. But when we get down to it, who is this really benefitting? Me? No, absolutely not.
I promise all this rambling is leading up to something.
For far too long I've kept people as friends on Facebook because they're petty, overdramatic, or trying to use Facebook as a platform for social justice, and to put it quite simply: I find it entertaining. Another factor that plays into my ongoing virtual friendship with these people is the fear of offending them by removing them from my friend list. Today, I saw a post I viewed as hypocritical (and slightly entertaining,) and spent far too long mulling it over and internally mocking them for being so blind and foolish. A few hours later, while scrolling through my newsfeed, I noticed the same post again, and after a couple seconds of deliberation, simply defriended the individual. Keeping these people on my friend list simply for entertainment, is rude to them and doing me no benefit. After that I decided that I was done keeping people around for entertainment, or for fear of offending them, so I then proceeded to remove a couple other "friends" with whom I have no desire for future contact, and who are as likely as not to notice the fact that I removed them as a friend.
It is easy for social media, especially Facebook, to occupy too much of my time, and I'm not going to enable it to take even more of my time by maintaining virtual friendships with people whom I'm not actually friends. That being said, I'm not defending anyone maliciously, because I'm harboring any hard feelings, or because I think they're a waste of my time, but because it's not worthwhile for me to spend my time on the pettiness of a person with whom I barely have contact. It's only realistically possible to maintain so many friendships, and I'm done concerning myself with friendships that barely exist, even on a virtual level.
I don't want to end this post on a negative note, so I guess I'll say that 2014 is already shaping up to be a good year, provided this weather changes. I'll be posting again once I have something that doesn't come across so ranty.
I don't want to end this post on a negative note, so I guess I'll say that 2014 is already shaping up to be a good year, provided this weather changes. I'll be posting again once I have something that doesn't come across so ranty.
