Ever since deleting facebook I've felt so much ___. It's only once I quit the site I was able to take a long hard look at my perception of ____ and realized that everyone else does ____ while I should do _____. I realized that I'm actually ____, not ____. I started handling my _____ relationships in a healthier, more ____ manner.
When I was in high school I was a middle distance runner.
I trained a bit harder than I should have. I was lucky to never have a significant injury that made me unable to run for more than a couple days, but there were definitely times when I felt burnt out, and I didn't compete after high school. Burnout, stress fractures and other roadblocks were very common among kids who ran more than eight miles a day, but many of us had this attitude that we had to take risks and push ourselves. I think we felt pressured because college wasn't far off, and we really only had one shot to go D1.
I'd troll a running forum called Dyestat a lot and there was this goon a grade above me who'd post questions every day about how he should structure his training (e.g. "is increasing 10% per week too much? How long should my long run be?"). The questions weren't bad questions, but everyone found them absurd because he'd run 10, maybe 15 miles in a week. How about spend time actually training instead of talking about training?
Because he took his boundaries so seriously, he increased his training load at a snail's pace -- I don't think he ran a 60 mile week before college. He improved consistently every year, never got injured, and never burned out. He went D2 (D1 > D3 > D2) and killed it. Now at 26 he runs 100+ mile weeks at 6:00 pace and tools on kids at the turkey trot every year. I check his twitter from time to time and it's clear he loves the sport as much as I did when I started.
I like to think that the difference was that he had a long-term goal that wasn't attached to some instantaneous outcome. He wanted to be able to push himself for the rest of his life, even if it meant waiting till past his prime to be any good.
I think in general if you make a change that's sustainable for the rest of your life, you win.
Tiny improvements add up. The human mind (and body) is an incredible machine. You keep doing something, have a feedback loop, and it will automatically get better at it. In a few years, the transition in the skill level will almost feel magical.
Haha weird reading this here. I was a runner as well who ran at a lower-tier D1 school. Definitely burned out mentally, because I was always trying to train hard and find the "extra edge," when in reality the edge is a competitive mindset that is in the moment during races, pushing you exactly 100%. I read Letsrun way too much, and obsessed over the details when the right route was right in front of me the whole time.
Ever since deleting facebook I've felt so much ___. It's only once I quit the site I was able to take a long hard look at my perception of ____ and realized that everyone else does ____ while I should do _____. I realized that I'm actually ____, not ____. I started handling my _____ relationships in a healthier, more ____ manner.
I deleted my Facebook in 2010 and it stayed deleted until the end of 2016. Now I get invited to more events, my friends no longer feel like distant strangers when I see them for the first time in months and I know how all my family is doing. It really sucks seeing how much more of a life some people have through facebook but research is a lifestyle and I knew what I signed up for. Your miles may vary though as I have the discipline to not look at it every hour(not because I'm intrinsically any better than you but because I got used to running mental marathons for 6 years).
This is worrying from the perspective of Facebook having so much power. It sounds like in your case, the enjoyment of your life i.e. "get invited to more events" and indeed one of the lower 'needs' is enhanced by joining Facebook (and reduced by leaving it).
If Facebook is the Junk Food of Socializing, it is like a McDonalds that has successfully lobbied for a ban on the sale of home cookware, whilst buying out all the other restaurant chains.
As someone toying with the idea of "getting back into" social media, how did you go about making your profile "normal"? I'm not the type to take tons of selfies, so do I just start out with a shitty profile picture? I feel like it'll look like a fake account, or me like a weird dude, compared to my friends who all have amazing profiles.
^^^ And this is the type of mentality that makes me not want to use social media :tm:.
I'm the complete opposite. I want to get back into facebook because I want other people to see all the cool stuff I'm doing and feed my ego, but I know that doing it would be inconsistent with my desire for a more free society, and I hate most people anyway.
There's only one thing a profile pic needs to do: reliably signal that this is the specific person of that name that people are looking for.
A reasonably well-lit picture of your face will serve admirably. Serious or happy or amused are good expressions; try not to look angry or sad. There, you're done.
It's not a big deal, just put as much as you're comfortable with, there's no such thing as "normal usage," everyone is different. I post updates only a few times a year and I don't post pictures. Nobody cares if you aren't using Facebook "enough."
I hardly ever think about how many reactions I get relative to how many my friends get, because different people have different numbers of friends and friendship patterns. It's not a score and I don't know anyone who treats it that way other than people in their teens or involved in marketing.
