For me, social media is a double edged sword. I like it, but I hate it, but I need it, but I don’t want to need it.

Instagram I’m pretty chill with. I scroll for a bit, sometimes an ad catches my eye and leads to a purchase or researching a possible purchase. And I’ve kind of fallen off the X/Twitter wagon to be honest. I did like it mostly for news, but for whatever reason I’m just not checking it anymore.

I haven’t gotten a TicToc account and hopefully will never. I know people say there are many useful things you can learn from it, recipes etc but I feel like social media takes up enough and maybe too much time as it is.

So the only other thing left is evil little Facebook. I feel I check it too often. It’s almost addictive, the FOMO. (Fear of missing out, on what? Silly little tidbits of gossip?) It’s ridiculous honestly. And sometimes I feel myself getting annoyed with what other people post. Sometimes I feel people are boastful on Facebook. But then again I’m sure people are annoyed with what I post sometimes, which is lately, swarms of pictures of my three year old. And maybe at times I appear boastful. I did post pics of a family vacation last fall. Does that look like I’m bragging? I don’t know, possibly.

I actually did deactivate my FB account for some months. It was freeing. It was great. But then, I started a non profit group. A charity where I collect brand name, brand new shoes for kids in school in a remote First Nation community north of where I live. And what better way for free advertising than FB? So I rejoined FB and started a separate page for my charity and it’s been really useful for that.

Another bonus of FB is that it reminds me of when I was a kid and my Dad would be reading the weekly paper and come across a classified ad of something that caught his eye. Now this was BEFORE social media, before laptops, smartphones and even the internet. So if he saw say a tractor or some other piece of farm machinery he thought might be a good buy, to find out who was selling it, you had to look up the phone number. In the ad, there was no name attached to the item right, just a description of the item and a phone number to CALL, not text. Texting was not a thing back then as cell phones were not a thing back then.

So my Dad would say, “Carla, get out the phone book and look up this number, see who’s selling this blah blah blah.” Because all of the little towns around where we lived each had their own prefix, you could tell by the number, which town you should look through and that helped narrow it down. And these towns were pretty small. And so I’d start with the A’s and work my way through every single person/number until I got a match.

So I kind of liken this to how we can investigate things and people on FB. Oh a new coworker at my job, let’s creep them on FB and check them out. I want to see who they really are, who they’re married to, do they have kids, are they weird. Or if you see an ad on FB you can check out the person who’s selling the item and determine if you would buy from that person or not, superficially based on what you see on their FB page.

Some people really put themselves out there on FB and actually kind of journal their life, even their day, for everyone to see. It’s really quite interesting. But then again it’s not. What’s the point? Is the point just to get attention? I think so most of the time. Which is kind of sad, then again I’ve probably been guilty of the same.