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> I left because it was making me someone I am not — someone who lives life through the eyes of others.

I agree so much. I was never an avid Facebook user who posts personal life but I was reading over other's lives and that affected who I am, what I should do with my life. Even though I feel I have full control over my life, what I read from FB about my friends changed what I should be doing to be in the current "trend" to belong to the group.

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Yeah, I agree with that quote so much. I was a pretty avid user, and only very slowly realized that I'd begun carrying around "The Audience" in my head, which judged what I did and how I looked at all times.

Becoming disenchanted with that mode of consciousness was a very long journey, I'm humbled to say. A key moment for me was realizing that if I was in the city where some "friend" or another lived, I wouldn't try to contact them.

That's not a real friend. I'm not being a real friend. In fact, everything in the whole domain is mislabled, and who wins? The company and it's advertisers. Value is leeched from real-life existence.

Glad to be gone from it -- unknown, away, without apparent value!

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