Fakebook

Every day for the past two weeks, my friend’s stream of Facebook posts poured onto my timeline, engulfing my entire newsfeed with photos of him and his latest girlfriend, having such a comical time together. They can’t get enough of each other. They really can’t.  They are glued at the hips.  They must share every dish of food.  Pictures and pictures of them gazing passionately into one another eyes.

Then, suddenly, his posts seemed to stopped appearing on my feed.  At first, I made an assumption that Facebook’s algorithms was becoming so advance that it somehow read my mind and purged all posts that I considered rubbish.  But I was wrong. I hopped on over to his Facebook page and low and behold, most of his recent posts are gone.  Vanished. Disappeared.  Well, not all of them, just the ones with his girlfriend.  It’s as if she never existed.  What did replace those posts, though, were images with itaclized inspirational quotes on how to avoid dating a sociopath.

Then, no more than one week after they had presumably broken up, he began posting pictures of them together.

I cannot seem to find the right word that encapsulates how I feel about the entire situation.  But, I do find it interesting. Interesting that you can digitally erase someone from your history, as if you never met the person. One click here, one click there and poof, problem solved. You’ve rewritten your entire history (it’s like git rebase, but for your life instead of source code).

I find that unless the material you are posting is self incriminating, it should be left in tact. Those memories—failed relationships, embarassing moments during your drunken stupor, convictions of being with “the one”—are an important part of your story.  It paints an important picture.  They tell us who you are, and perhaps how much you changed. So please, don’t delete your history. I genuinely want to know if you dated a sociopath.