Millennials & The Evolution of Facebook
If you were born 1985-1990, you graduated high school around the birth of Facebook. Facebook launched in 2004 and it was originally intended as a way for college kids to meet and stay in touch with their peers.
I graduated high school in 2006 and started college that fall. Facebook was all the rage. It was something you had to get. Like any college freshman, I had no idea what I was doing and I desperately wanted friends, so I signed up. It proved to be a great way to stay in touch with high school friends who I just left and network with new college students from classes, ask them questions, and start the infamous ‘Facebook stalk’ on any and all crushes.
Essentially Millenials “grew up” with this website. That’s what we know. And so today, we are still living a college mindset of needing to always be in touch with all our friends all the time. We don’t know anything else.
In the beginning (I can’t believe I just wrote those words about Facebook), I remember feeling guilty over only having 30 friends when others had 90.
We felt we had to grow our friends list to be worthy. We “friended anyone we met - students in our classes, people from work, random girl your met at the coffee shop, people we just met at networking events, and even first dates. We invited them into our personal lives right away.
We felt like we had to stay connected. We must have more friends. That was surely the way to navigate college, get a job and get ahead, right? You never knew who would connect you with that incredible opportunity down the road, so add anyone you meet.
Now we all have social networks of 1,000’s possibly. They can see, judge, have an opinion on and comment on everything you do. They’re all up in your business all the time! We don’t have the mental capacity to deal with this PLUS have strong personal connections in real life. No wonder our society is falling apart.
Remember when our parents' generation started to join Facebook? You had to explain to them the difference between their Facebook feed, message and a comment. You would watch them mistakenly make a public post instead of sending a private message or ‘poke’ your random friend from high school? (Remember the poke button? How useless was that?)
It was super funny how we were so “in” and knew how to use Facebook so well and they were so out of it.
But they had a great advantage to us. The baby boomer generation having come into Facebook later got to be waaaaay more selective of the friends they have or want. Which turned out to be a good thing, in my opinion (or IMO like the cool kids on Facebook say). They get to be in touch with only the people whom they want. They get to curate their friend list in a way to have only their personal friends and family see everything happening in their lives.
Now the jokes’s on us.
We have friends from the beginning of Facebook. We have become over-saturated with friends and connections.
We are still maintaining friendships from college and high school. We wouldn’t normally stay in touch with or see these people until our class reunions every 5-10 years. We don’t even want some of these friendships, but we didn’t know there was an option or we don’t want to offend anyone by un-friending them (remmber when friend was a noun and not a verb?)
We are inundated with constant communication and over-thinking our actions and it’s driving us crazy.
Humans are social creatures by nature. We used to need approval from others to get protection. Today, we have a huge group to gain or lose approval from and so it’s terrifying to navigate the world.
We are being evaluated by our entire social network consisting of all our past co-workers, colleagues, bosses, exes, high school and college aquaintences, and being judged by ALL of them instead of just our small group of family and friends.
So yeah, it’s flipping hard to walk away from this mindset!
How do we do it? Here are some ideas.
· Self-Discovery. Think back to your college years beginning Facebook. How did you feel about Facebook? Excitement when you got a friend request from a cute person in your class? Or despair by not doing enough or not having enough friends? Or a little of both?
· Mindfulness. Change your mindset. Think who do you actually stay in touch with (and want to stay in touch with). In a pre-Facebook age, who would you actually call up on the phone?
· Detox. Go through your friend list and get rid of people (sit with the guilty feeling and do it anyway)
· Intention. Catch yourself when you are on Facebook and scrolling or falling into FOMO despair. Then call someone and talk to them. Your life and your friends IRL are the ones that matter.
· Growth. Keep going. You’ll fall back into your old patterns, we’re all human. But keep in mind how you want to live your life separate from Facebook and keep moving in that direction. You got this.