I Quit Facebook

Hello. Please excuse the delay in completing my travel log. I promise that I will get back to it in the next week or so.

I've been horrendously busy. It's a good thing. My candle business is growing like gangbusters and there is simply a lot to do. Yay!

In the midst of it all, I made a rather rash and rebellious decision; I quit Facebook. Not only did I quit Facebook, but I jumped onto LinkedIn and quit that one, too. The next step is to quit MySpace. I haven't used MySpace in months, maybe even years, but I do have a log-in, and I'm going to quit.

Withdrawal symptoms still persist. When I walked by my computer (no matter what I was doing) I would stop to hit F9 in my email to see if I had any thing new in my inbox (this is still a problem) and then flipping over to the FB tab and refreshing the site to see if that glorious red flag was alight or if there was a number next to my inbox telling me how many FB messages I had. A few weeks ago, I tried to ween myself off FB by only checking it twice a day. That worked a bit, but when I really thought about it, I didn't need to know.

I think life is about quantity time as well as quality time.

Don't get me wrong, I loved seeing names of people who I don't see much, but I didn't (don't) have time to be with everyone all the time. None of us do. There are real live people who need us to be more attentive in real life. I think life is about quantity time as well as quality time. We simply can't really share our 24 hours each day with hundreds of people. When we do, we spread ourselves too thin.

Physical presence is important to me. The phone is important to me. The social networking on the internet had become too important, too time consuming, too much of a distraction to my real life social networking.

So I quit.

Seth Godin is a fantastic thinker and I read his blog everyday. How he writes about so many diverse topics with such frequency, I don't know. His brain must just be overflowing with information that he must get out. I try to do the same on my Rainbows and Candles website. I share everything I can with my fellow candle consultants. I aspire to be like Seth Godin: available, smart, direct, diverse, and well-respected for those things.

I just came across a short video Q&A where Seth offers his opinion about about online social networking for businesses. I couldn't agree with it more, and I think it also applies to social networking for real friends.

I'm going to go create and continue to develop the social networks that really matter to me. Anyone wanna talk face-to-face or on the phone? I do!

P.S. A special thank you to Renee who just emailed me photos of Sara's first day at school. Renee took the time to do that for me because I'm not on FB anymore. To me that meant the world. I love you, Renee!