What Your Facebook Status Says About You!

Every waking moment, thoughts about our lives, our experiences, and our identities linger on an infinite thread. Do we ever look to reflect on the ways we look at ourselves? The Daili Lama once wrote, “The way to examine how thoughts and emotions arise in us is through introspection. It is quite natural for many different thoughts and emotions to arise. When we leave them unexamined and untamed this leads to untold problems, crises, suffering and misery. When they are reflected on, it promotes a deep understanding of who we are.” The mind is as difficult to control as the wind some might say, but I on the other hand see that we can control our thoughts. I mean aren’t we harnessing wind energy nowadays? Greening anyone???

Either way, leaving our thoughts and feelings unchecked and untamed can lead to untold problems, crises, suffering and misery. Don’t believe it? Here's how.

My friends’ girlfriends’ mother has a Facebook page and my friend decided to friend request her. So they are now ‘Facebook Friends.’ My friend goes to a party one night and hooks up with another girl. My friend told the girl he hooked up with that it was a mistake for them to hook up and he had a girlfriend so she agreed not to tell anyone. Everything seemed cool until his girlfriend called him the next day and dumped him because she said she saw him making out with another girl. My friend was unaware that someone had taken a photo of him making out with the other girl and he was ‘tagged,’ allowing his girlfriends mother to see the photo of his promiscuous antics. Because he mentioned how “fucked up” he got during the party in his status update, this served as the invitation his girlfriends mother used to view his page and the photos he was ‘tagged’ in consequently telling his girlfriend about him cheating which lead to the break up. Problems, crisis, suffering, misery? I would tag this under ‘homerun’ because he definitely cleared all the bases on this one.

Here’s another example of how leaving our thoughts and feelings unchecked can lead to untold problems:

Before I left my full time job to pursue writing professionally, I noticed there were a lot of my colleagues who had Facebook profiles of their own – some even in management. There was this one colleague of mine who was faithful with changing her status updates every 20 minutes or so. She would update ‘us’ (us meaning her Facebook friends which I am one of them) about her child’s first words, her second husbands nasty coffee breathe and how much looking at her credit card balance every month just made her buy more Starbucks. The time came for end of the year evaluations and unfortunately she was let go from her position, presumably because of the missed hours of productivity used to tell her Facebook friends about Jim’s coffee teeth and little Julie’s first steps. Problems, crisis, suffering, misery? No job? That’s problems, crisis, suffering and misery wrapped all in one.

Facebook, MySpace and Twitter are the threading that connects us to the sphere of the human matrix we are linked to through today’s technology. Part of the ‘quo’ to belonging to these virtual techno-communities is that we must fully participate and integrate ourselves within its platform. The way we do this is by populating our Facebook and MySpace profiles with the 100’s of books that we like, the 1000’s of songs we love, the 10,000’s of pictures we’ve been tagged in and the 100,000’s of thoughts and feelings we think about ourselves.

Thoughts about who we are, inside and out, do linger on an infinite thread. This is natural. And with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter as the transistors on this thread, boy do they help in quantifying its infinance. Granted, it’s cool to know about a party that was “off the hook” or if “it’s complicated” with your high school sweetheart, now that we’re adults. But is this normal, is this right, is this healthy? My answers, “No, I don’t know” and “you decide,” respectively. In our age of techno-diversity, adaptation and change is our health indicator. But leaving these thoughts and emotions unchecked leaves us emotionally, morally, physically and spiritually malnourished.

“What are you doing right now?” I ask myself. “I’m peace” the other voice in my head whispers back. I guess that’s all you need to know.