The Illusion of Freedom (from Facebook)

For the second time, I have deactivated my Facebook profile.  The first time I was naive enough to think it was permanent.  This time, I wonder if I will have the resolve to actually request a permanent removal.

Out of some two hundred, there were less than five people with whom my Facebook interactions could be construed to be analagous to the interactions of actual friends. Perhaps another another 5 or 8 were analagous to acquaintanceship.

I am being generous.  To myself.

To maintain this much semi-regular human contact, I found myself fashioning a version of myself edited to be acceptable to what I perceived to be an increasingly intolerant and narrow-minded peer group.

This is what people do.  It is normal in non-Facebook interactions as well.

I do not object to it, I simply find it difficult and fatigueing, and I am not very good at it. 

An often repeated anecdote of mine is when my then-employer told me I had "an honesty problem", by which he meant that I was too honest too often and it was causing problems.

I don't work any more, thankfully.  I am not as sure how thankful I am that I no longer have non-Facebook human interaction with anyone other than immediate family, and even that is for a small minority of the hours in a given day or week.

All things considered, including past history, this is probably all for the best.

I did not remove myself from the synthetic society of Facebook in at attempt to force myself into participating in more direct human interaction.  I removed myself because, as mentioned, I was failing to participate in a consistently correct manner, and my failures, or more specifically the responses to my failures, were becoming more painful than I was willing to continue to endure.

The only additive behavioural change I am hoping for is more time applied to other kinds of writing, such as this blog, where I do not need to concern myself with who I might alienate with what I say.

I choose a public blog instead of a private journal simply because I cannot motivate myself to write without at least having a credible basis for imagining that I am writing to some kind of audience.  That sounds egotistical because it is.  I see no point in being apologetic about having an ego as it seems to be a fundamental part of being human, and a minimal requirement for believing that there might be a reason to proceed to the next day.   I suspect that many of the people who lose the will to proceed to the next day are people who have lost all perceptible sense of ego.