About a month ago I made a decision which made my life considerably happier. After weighing the pros and cons of logging on to Facebook, I ended up deciding that, for me, the negatives of seeing all that information about people I know (and the people they know), far outweighed the positives. I decided to stop visiting Facebook and frankly, I’ve not missed it one bit.

To be sure, I had some good experiences on Facebook, such as regularly connecting with my cousin Barbara in Rhode Island, and being aware of a life-threatening emergency of a friend living in Hawaii, but by and large I found Facebook to be an annoying array of polls and spam-like game requests, and worse, an illumination of too much personal information about people I know.

I grant everyone the right to their opinions, even within my family there is wide divergence of opinion on politics, religion, education and more. I have people in my life whom I consider friends who I know I disagree with on major issues, and somehow, prior to Facebook, we could maintain relatively healthy and friendly relationships.

Facebook is changing all that. By encouraging people to post their every thought, and making it so easy to do, I am finding that people whom I like and respect are lessened in my eyes. The funny thing is that Facebook hasn’t changed the way they think, it’s just shown a light on those thoughts, and propagated them for all to see, for eternity.

From posts engaged in blatant (and often completely ignorant) political posturing to seeing people discussing references to how much they partied last night, how much they hate their boss or their job, etc., Facebook reveals just how little they understand about the internet and it’s potential to follow them for the rest of their lives.

My personal favorite was a casual acquaintance who worked at a local golf club, got fired for poor performance, started posting regularly on Facebook about her drinking and marijuana smoking, then proudly announced her new career as a child care provider. Oh yes, then this college drop out started posting about her fears that the President was a Socialist. I doubt she could define socialism, much less relate its tenets to anything going on in today’s society, but hey, Facebook doesn’t require you to be smart.

I’ll admit it – I’m a cynic by nature. I don’t trust people to do the right thing, be they Presidents or plumbers. One of my favorite reads these days is Matt Taibbi, a muckraking journalist for Rolling Stone, who pulls no punches, linguistically or otherwise, in shining a light on the fetid system of current American capitalism. I encourage you to check out his blog, or his articles in Rolling Stone. If nothing else, I find his writing extremely humorous even as he makes me question the very foundations of our system of government. He also writes about NFL football for Rolling Stone, and his description of the new Cowboy’s Stadium is not to be missed. (“… a debutant ball for America’s new idiot fascism….. there was something weirdly compelling about seeing 100,000 Texans cheering historical footnote George W. Bush as they christened what promises to be about 490 years of municipal sales-tax payments, all so that Jerry Jones can see a 160-foot-wide image of his own surgery-tightened face on the world’s biggest HDTV.”)

I love reading Taibbi’s blog for its harshness and hyperbole, but don’t wish read about his every thought and certainly don’t want him sending me Mafia Wars requests every day or asking me to take a poll about how well I know him. I’m almost certain we’re not related, and I could care less about his current score in Bejeweled.

So hasta la vista Facebook. I wish I could say it was fun, but by and large, it wasn’t. For every good thing I saw on you, there were three which made me either angry or sad, and frankly, life’s too short to spend thinking about all that stuff.