You may have noticed that you can no longer find the Ridiculously Efficient page on Facebook. As a team, we have decided to unpublish our page for the foreseeable future.
On a personal level, I’ve been toying with this idea for awhile -- leaving Facebook and putting my efforts into my other social media pages, and better yet, into IRL relationships.
When I joined Facebook, it was during undergrad, at the suggestion of a high school friend at Harvard, when “The Facebook” was restricted to the Ivy League. Facebook has changed a lot since, and the way people use Facebook has changed, too.
To be honest, it’s not the best place for us to engage with you and the Ridiculously Efficient community. Here are the top reasons why:
1. I don’t use Facebook.
Truth: I rarely log onto Facebook -- on the order of one to three times a year, and usually just to do one or two specific things.
Using Facebook drains me. It bombards me with information with minimal impact on everyday life.
Scrolling through the feed forces me to devote mental bandwidth to people I haven’t hung out with in over a decade, or read too-personal content from work colleagues, or fall for clickbait articles, amygdala-assaulting news or insanely well-personalized ads.
Even after tailoring my feed and culling my friends list, my news feed was peppered with life events, from baby announcements to travel photos, to learning about someone’s sickness or their family members’ death. These posts, meant to connect, only incited undesirable feelings of jealousy, FOMO or schadenfreude.
2. Our team rarely uses Facebook.
Here’s another truth: When I asked my team how they use Facebook, they felt similarly to me.
If I don’t enjoy using Facebook, and our team doesn’t enjoy using Facebook, why are we using Facebook? Bye.
3. Privacy is the new luxury.
Each week, we hear about another big data breach or learn that a company has mistreated personal data.
The easiest way to protect your personal privacy isn’t to tailor your privacy settings -- it’s to minimize outside exposure to private information.
Instead of waiting for market pressures or government regulation to force companies to give their users “the right” to privacy, I’m going to start reducing my dependency on services that aggressively abuse customer data.
4. Being present is the new gift.
In my IRL friend circle, we have an unstated policy to avoid posting photos of each other when we’re troublemaking together in my backyard. While the rest of the world overshares, we charge our phones in the officebar and enjoy each other’s presence.
Try this next time you go out to dinner: count how many phones you see diners using at the tables. Take inventory of people’s ages, and how often they’re on their phones during a meal.
What would those people talk about if they didn’t have their phones to entertain them?
When Mike and I dine out, sometimes we have minutes of silence, and sometimes we talk for hours. Those moments of total presence -- including the silent moments -- are priceless.
I feel most alive when I’m fully present. Most of the time I spend on social media is unmemorable. To maximize my experience of life, my priorities are clear.
Where to Connect
Where you will find me and Ridiculously Efficient, for now, is on Twitter and Instagram.
Even though Facebook owns Instagram, I’ve gravitated to the platform much more recently – it’s fun to look at photos of what others are doing without delving too deep, and I can selectively share moments from my day with minimal long-term impact.
And while my personal enjoyment of Twitter waxes and wanes, it’s still a great way to curate how you receive interesting content.
How humans connect with each other has always been evolving. I’m hoping the next wave of innovation brings us closer together online and IRL.
