Facebook is that social media account that everyone got before 2010 and has become a walk-in diary of what life was like and how different it was even a few years ago. I personally had my account since 2008, so when I was in year 9. 13-Year-old Fatima is very different to how I am today, and the ‘memories’ feature would expose me to that level of cringe every single day.
I recently decided to delete Facebook, for many different reasons in all honesty. Part of it was to hide the cringe, but also because there are a lot of posts and pictures there that are not representative of who I am today. I wouldn’t consider myself to be a particularly sentimental person so seeing a lot of the previous posts isn’t the happiest experience. With every over the top post comes memories – both good and bad – from what was happening and what I was like at the time.
Now I could have just deleted all my friends and kept it as a shrine to my memories, but I’m not particularly sentimental and the idea of having an easily accessible digital footprint to my teenage self was deeply unsettling. It’s not like I was even involved in anything bad back then, but I feel like now is the best time for me to finally say goodbye to Facebook. I no longer feel like I need to keep it, everyone I spoke to on there now has my number and other ways to contact me. It’s lost all purpose.
Back when I first started using it, it was the social media site that was the most active. There wasn’t Instagram, Snapchat or anything that rivalled it. After school, we would literally go to our laptops and computers and log in to Facebook to talk, chat and generally post funny pictures. I remember staying up for hours just to have in-depth chats with friends, and honestly, it was a different time.
Now I only kept it to speak to certain people, and even then, it was easy to transfer those conversations to WhatsApp. There was no ‘need’ to use Facebook since everyone’s moved on to newer social media. I spend a lot more time on Instagram now than I ever did on Facebook – which I know is ironic since Facebook owns Instagram.
So now it’s finally time to say farewell to it and good riddance.
