Life updates for the young and bored: Reading back on old Facebook posts
Today I’ve decided to ‘clean up’ my Facebook profile, get rid of a few ‘friends’, make sure my privacy settings are up to date etc. A feature I’ve discovered is called ‘Manage posts’ where you can see a list of every status and photo you’ve posted on Facebook and easily manage them. You can click on up to 50 and just hit delete, or hide them from your timeline. I don’t have anything morbidly embarrassing on my Facebook, but there are definitely some status updates that are making me think, “Why did you think people would care about that?” I will give you a sample in just a moment.
I got Facebook in my second to last year of high school, and this was when no one really had smart phones yet. A lot of people my age probably sat on Facebook for the first time on their family computer. I know in my home that my first few months on Facebook were on dial up internet. No one needs to make a phone call in the next hour? Great.
Looking back, it was honestly an exciting time. Facebook came into me and my friends’ lives when we thought we were mature, but really had no clue about a lot of things. With no full time job, university degree, mortgage or savings goals to worry about, a lot of our time was spent investing energy and interest into our friends’ mundane lives, and projecting details of our own mundane lives. Give us a social media platform to etch all of this into the internet, and a new way to spend time was born.
These days, I use Facebook mainly for events and the Messenger feature. I can’t remember the last time I wrote a status or changed my profile picture. Over the years I’ve reduced my friend list to a few hundred and unfollowed pages that I don’t care about anymore. Safe to say the way I use the platform has changed and I often fantasize about deleting it altogether.
I remember earlier this year I was telling a story about something that happened years ago. It must have had something to do with Facebook because at one point I said, “This was back in the day when people actually made status updates on Facebook.” My friend laughed and said, “Wow, that’s so true, no one writes a status on Facebook anymore!” You could say Twitter has taken over as people’s way to etch their fleeting thoughts onto the internet, but there’s something so raw and unabashed about Facebook in the early years.
In honour of a time when people did make Facebook status updates, I give you a highlight reel of some of my personal favourites from a younger me:
2009
Has a profile pic! Yay-ya!!!
Had an okay day but tomorrow’s a new one so we’ll see how that goes
Home sick watching Ellen
Is awake and ready to face the day
Feeling really dumb after parent teacher interviews with my French Teacher
2010
Just spent two hours at the dentist
We’ve all been conditioned to not make mistakes, but I can’t live that way
Oh how your tumblr fascinates me for all the wrong reasons
Has finished high school. Full stop! 🙂
And to finish off with a little bit of wisdom I gained once I left high school.
2011
Has been reduced to reading back over old myspace messages. it’s crazy how much has changed in a few years and it’s overwhelming to think that there are certain people I no longer have anything to do with.
It’s a little childish and stupid, but then again, so is high school
Who knew that there’d be simpler time in the world of social media, when people wrote down their innocent thoughts, shared a photo from a party, or gave everyone a boring life update. Lots of old photos and posts on Facebook do make me smile, though most of the time they just make me reach for the ‘hide’ or ‘delete’ button.
Tell me, have you ever discovered old social media posts from 10 years ago? What did they make you think?
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Featured Photo by NeONBRAND on Unsplash
Maze of Moments 
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