Positive Reinforcement Loop

Not much has happened over the week so I thought I’d write about a couple articles I read, and also maybe about why I’m no longer using Facebook quite as routinely as I used to.

So my cousin sent me this great article the other day. It’s a great read, and you may identify some of the points as things you knew as a teenager. Well pat yourself on the back. Others you may be thinking that you wish you were given such sagely advice during your teen years. For me, I really wish #5, 8, 10, 13, & 15. I probably like #13 the most. I feel like a lot of my teen years and probably even now, are spent avoiding being wrong and hiding from it. Being paralyzed by the fear of being wrong or not good enough has probably held me back in a lot of things.

Still we get older, we learn, we grow, and we move on. We are humans after all. What’s some cheesy line you’d hear in a movie? We have an indomitable will to survive. Some might classify us as a disease, a cancer upon the planet. Well at least Agent Smith would. I personally like Rurouni Kenshin’s “The will to live is stronger than anything”, right before he owns Aoshi. Wow that got off-topic real fast.

So I’m trying to stop using Facebook. I feel like I am spending too much time on it. It really is a huge time sink. And It’s not like I was gaining anything to better myself as a person (normally). And while it is good for keeping in touch here and there, I’ve come to view Facebook as just an egregious black hole of wasted time. A majority of the time I just see posts that fall into one of these 7 categories. I mean I think everyone’s guilty of 1. I know I am. I think it’s just human nature, to be proud of things you did and to want the praise of your compatriots for accomplishing something difficult. #2, 4, 5, and 6 are more forgivable and more easily ignored, but on some occasions they can be pretty amusing. Whereas #7 is pretty hit or miss. But #2 is probably what irritates me the most. Whether they are good or bad cliffhangers, it’s always just annoying and clearly an attention grab. I’m pretty sure I’ve done this a few times in my past, but I realized it was stupid and stopped – or I got yelled at by good friends, I’m sure one or the other happened.

Another reason I see Facebook as a plague upon social interactions that is touched upon in that article, that I find increasingly irritating is all the image crafting going on. I don’t want to say I’m not guilty of it and I’m pretty sure this blog could be argued as entirely hypocritical, but I hope that with the semi-weekly posts, and the associated text it may come off less as image crafting and more of “this is what my life is like so when we catch up in person we can talk about more substantial things than ‘I went on vacation 3 months ago and it was AMAZING’.” I mean that was the point of the blog originally. Though Jen did argue that people do this when you meat them face-to-face too. True, but at least then the imagecrafting is limited to actual person-to-person interactions with them, and I’m not being barraged by it by everyone everyday.

Ravi pointed out that our generation has a need to be stimulated and it’s a problem. By putting something cool on Facebook, all sorts of people “Like” it, this gives you all sorts of warm fuzzies, and so you post more of the same kind of posts. Humans are social creatures and so we really like that kind of attention (usually), and so this just creates a positive feedback loop and nothing ever gets better.

In any case, that’s why I’m limiting my use of Facebook with the eventual goal of not using it anymore.

*gets off soapbox* Onto some lighter content!

I made Spinach & Ricotta stuffed pasta shells for dinner and they lasted for lunch and dinner for a while. I still have some leftover stuffing and shells, so I might just use the rest up sometime next week.