Six books on the go!

I’ve given up looking at Facebook.

For the time being.

“Yeah, right.” I hear you say.

No, really, I have. Today is day eight of not looking at Facebook.

The other morning I’d put the TV news on, and I sat there idly scrolling. Putin is waging war against the ordinary folk of Ukraine, there’d been a devastating earthquake on the Syria/Turkey border, and I was seeking distraction by scrolling through Facebook on my mobile phone.
I thought to myself, “Why am I doing this?” and didn’t come up with any sort of sensible answer.

First world problems, eh?

I like Facebook, oh sure I’ve got into a few scrapes on Facebook but it was also through Facebook that I was offered the opportunity to go to Poland and meet a group of folks a number of which I now count as friends and not just in the Facebook sense of that word.

Do I miss Facebook? Yes, I do. I miss posting silly, humorous things and having people laugh. I miss posting a serious or interesting thing and engaging in the conversation that it sometimes encourages. I miss the simple pleasure of interacting with folk that I know.

But Facebook, for me at least of late has become just a morning (noon, afternoon, evening and night) ritual of the endless scroll, procrastinating about the bush, if I may paraphrase Wallace of Wallace and Gromit fame.

I resisted getting a mobile phone, back when such things were becoming popular. I only relented when after going to meet my mother off of the train from Lincolnshire at King’s Cross, the train that I was on was delayed and I couldn’t tell mum that I’d be a bit late.

Suitably chided by my mother who had already one, I bought a mobile phone.

Then Vince, a guy I worked with at the time invited me to join Facebook. I wavered; it took a few years but eventually I was hooked.

And now it seems that some of us simply can’t function without their mobile phone and their social media presence. Stoical media as I ofttimes call it, putting on a brave face for the onlookers. Not that I’ve ever been one of those to bemoan their fate and whinge about how bad the world is treating them but there is an element of playing to the audience, sometimes, and that old favourite, FOMO Yes, fear of missing out but missing what though? Aye, there’s the rub.

Will I go back to Facebook?

Yes, I will, I know I will, see “Do I miss Facebook?” above. When though? I don’t know, another week maybe, perhaps another fortnight. I just needed to get out of the cycle of interminable scrolling just for the sale of scrolling and when I do go back, I’ll try not to get caught up in the routine, for routine it had become.

It’s not as if I’ve nothing else to do here, I realised that I have six books on the go, no margarine but six books.

If you got the margarine reference there then full points to you and you are a person after my own slightly weird sense of, you know…
Yes, six books on the go. I’d best crack on with then then.

Six books on the go! More of (some) of that, later… If I, you know, get my bloomin’ finger out.