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The Night I Deleted 83% Of The People From My Life

"Tell your life story with a new kind of profile."

That was the tagline. It sounded innocent enough. Facebook was rolling out its latest profile redesign - the omnisciently titled Timeline: a new, more visually accessible layout that organized your social records in a chronological manner. Your life as a history, if you will.

“It’s like they took my whole life and laid it out in an easy-to-creep collage. I can’t stand it.”

One of my friends had just activated the new layout. Her initial reviews were tepid at best.

“I absolutely hate it.”

Up until that point, I had mostly been taken by Zuckerburg’s visual re-imagination – an unquestionable improvement – and not the reorganization of content. It’s the same information you’ve always made available, I tried to reason. But my friends were right – it was the newly instated accessibility of that information that was the issue. As one of my coworkers suggested, only half jokingly, it was “all starting to look like a data collection tool for the CIA”.

With a new year-by-year breakdown on each profile, you can instantly time warp back to any point in your Facebook existence with just one click. For me, this spanned 5 years, going back to my sophomore year of high school.

If you were anything like me in grade 10, you sucked. You talked a lot about Sum 41 and said things that you wish you did not. Mostly to girls. These are things that should be buried in the past, Jason Voorhees style. And yet, here they still remain - pristinely preserved in a digital time capsule for you and everyone you "know" to observe and analyze.

Suddenly, it hit me.

As I perused through the endless steams of inappropriate teenage conversation and outdated life views I once held 5 years ago, I began to understand. I don’t want anyone seeing this. Not now. Not again. Why would you? It’s one thing to express yourself when that’s who you are, but to re-broadcast it again 5 years after the fact? I’ll pass, thanks.

It was then that I realized I was crossing the line. I was over-sharing. Too many people could now learn too much too easily about me and my past. Which led me to ask myself the following question: if I wasn’t willing to truly open up my life to the majority of my FB friends (hereby known as ‘Friends’, because there’s clearly a distinction to be made), then why was I letting them in to begin with?

It was time to put the hammer down. I decided then and there that I would delete as many people as possible from my Facebook. There was too much clutter. Too many people to impress. Too much importance being placed on a screen. It’s not to say that I didn’t like these people or even that I didn’t want to stay in touch with them. I did. But the level of intimacy that each FB friendship demanded was becoming too much for me to handle. I wanted to start focusing more on the real relationships in my life.

I wanted my online social experience to start matching up with my real one.

1:17 am

The deletion spree began. Apparently I’d be starting with just under 400 friends. I somehow doubted that. Victim selection would be at random; just pull up your contacts list, scroll for a while, and start clicking on anyone that isn’t integral to your life. Trust your gut.

1:34 am

37 people gone in 17 minutes. That’s 2.17 people per minute, essentially removed from my life forever. As I was deleting, I couldn’t help but notice how many Friends other people had. 847. 1347. 2046 (for real). The numbers were astounding. Of course, those friends – that endless web of 2046 people – are at the root of the problem. Somewhere along the way, we mutated the definition of what it means to be friends. The concept of knowing someone has become far less significant.

1:50 am

My unfriend count reaches 57. I was cruising, slowed only by Facebook’s functionality. Since there’s no way to mass-delete people, you have to go to each individual profile page and stare your friend straight in the profile eyes before you pull the trigger. It’s a very morbid process to go through and, yes, there were a few instances where I weaseled out at the last second. However, there were also a few moments of unbridled joy as I dumped digital dead weight (ie. mulleted hockey players from high school, girls that I met once somewhere or something I think, et. al.) But overall, most the decisions to de-friend came with a little hint of sadness – a price I was willing to pay in order to lighten my social burden.

2:02 am

I’ve come up with a few simple criteria questions to help you in deciding which Friends are suitable for deleting. These include:

-- Have you met?

-- Have you met twice?

-- Would you say hello if you passed one another on the street?

-- Would you be willing to exchange this person’s existence for approximately 3 boxes of white cheddar mac n cheese?

2:10 am

Is she too hot to delete? Never mind. I think I just answered my own question. Chow.

2:23 am

I’m nearing 200 deletes and only getting faster. I’ve worked my mouse into a nice rhythm of opening tabs, deleting, and moving on to the next one. I barely feel it anymore. I’m like a reformed hoarder that will now stop at nothing to obtain the immaculate garage I deprived myself of for so many years.

2:33 am

BOOM. Just hit the halfway point at 200. I have, in essence, removed approximately 50% of the people from my social network forever. I’m still picking up speed. Aside from a few decisions that required an extra second of thought (and I mean that literally), the purge has been progressing with relative ease. I wonder what the reverse tipping point will be, AKA, the number of friends I reach before it becomes truly difficult to delete any further. My guess: 60.

2:44 am

Maybe I was being a bit ambitious. After just a few more rounds, I’m left at 170 Friends and it’s starting to get tough. It’s now at the point where I genuinely like and have had personal (albeit, often brief) relationships with all the people on my list. However, many are from chapters of my life that have long ago closed. It’s time to move on.

3:00 am

I just had my second wind. The pixilated clock strikes 3am and I’m down to 100 people – a mere 25% of what I began with 90 minutes ago. Sleep time. I will set up camp and regroup for the night. We’ll push for the summit tomorrow.

10:00 am

Back at it. I won’t lie, erasing all those people from my life weighed heavily on my mind last night. Fleeting moments of regret but mostly satisfaction. Just knocked off another 27 - down to 73 Friends in total. Not sure how much further I can take it.

10:12 am

Final tally = 70

* * * * * *

Two weeks after my social media cleanse, I was satisfied to notice that, in almost every sense, my life was unchanged. Nobody really felt “missing” and I certainly spent a little less time on Crackbook. When I do check my Newsfeed, it now feels like a Greatest Hits collection; each and every update comes from someone I genuinely want to listen to. There’s no wading through the weeds to find meaningful content and certainly a little less temptation to creep.

In the very off chance that you are one of the people I deleted, please don’t take it personally. I’d be more than happy to go out for coffee or catch up with you on the phone. But if our friendship can’t withstand a dependence on such intimate encounters, we’re probably not missing out on anything. Let’s just save our mindless banter and personal anecdotes for an awkward school reunion sometime down the road. It’ll just mean so much more then, don’t you think?

With all that said and done, I’d love to jubilantly throw my hands into the air and declare victory over The Evil Lord Zuckerburg. But the truth is that I still use Facebook every day. I still like the service and I’d be lying to myself if I said I had regained complete control over my social existence. Matter of fact, I suppose all I really did was heed to the advice that Facebook was trying to give me in the first place; I will most definitely be telling my life story with a new kind of profile.

I’ll just be telling it elsewhere.

@BrookJohnston

The Night I Deleted 83% Of The People From My Life

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