Facebook addiction: A Survivor’s Tale Part 3

Facebook opened itself up to 3rd party applications like games. Suddenly I found myself hooked. You might ask yourself at this point, what I was doing for a living, that I managed to play games for so long. Well, that’s the nature of Facebook addiction, my friend. There is no rationale. I was in the office, and we don’t have one of these fancy blocking systems like I hear they have in big companies. Nope. Out here in the mid-west, we don’t spend too much on stuff like that. It’s just the wind in your hair and Facebook friends on your back when you take too long to respond.

Ok so I took it too far. We’d be sending each other messages about really trivial things. Some of the status updates were just ridiculous. What else can you call a ‘broadcast’ about the jam having fallen from a donut and onto your shoe. I mean, if you don’t want jam falling on you then don’t eat a jam donut! But of course, such a negative status update would never do on Facebook. When you’re a Facebook addict, your Facebook friends are your dealer. You don’t want to upset your dealer. So I’d write something like ‘must’ve been tasty, that donut’, all the while choking at the thought of a donut-jam-shoe mixup, especially when I knew that she didn’t wash her shoes very often...

By now you’ve figured that this must be some surreal kind of fiction piece right? Well it could be. But you’ll just have to read on to find out. So this other time, another person sends me a message saying ‘hey, party on tomorrow night, my address is.... hope to see you there!’
Well I hadn’t spoken to this person for the longest time, and when a Facebook tool suggested I add them, I was too busy to bother saying no. Since then, there had been a relentless bombardment of invitations to things I had no interest in. But it was good to feel loved, so I kept them on. They produced the content that I needed to feed my Facebook addiction, and by this point it felt like nothing else mattered.