I’ve written about my love/hate relationship with Facebook before. Looking back, I can’t believe it’s been 10 years since I wrote that post and here I am once again feeling the same sort of frustration that I felt back then although for somewhat different reasons.
With over 3 billion active users, Facebook continues to be the world’s most popular social media platform, but it’s driving me crazy! I originally joined to connect with people who were important to me. I miss the days when my feed was filled with their photos and status updates. Now every time I look at Facebook, I see endless posts about the horrors happening south of our border, the vocal minority who want our province to separate from Canada, and the latest well-known evangelical Christian to admit to sexual sin, as well as numerous AI generated stories that may or may not contain elements of truth. I swear that my blood pressure climbs every time I scroll! Apparently, social media algorithms think these are the things I want to see, but they are not! I read local, national, and world news on several sites of my own choosing every day. I don’t need to see it on social media.
In the past, I found that I could clean up my newsfeed by hiding or blocking the sources of posts that I didn’t want to see. I’m still trying to do that, but it doesn’t seem to work as well as it once did. For every source that I block, several more appear. There seems to be no end of them!
So what’s the answer? What would happen if I just stepped away? Would I lose friendships? Would I miss something important? I know that I would lose the one connection that I still have with a number of acquaintances around the world and I would miss that, but is it worth it? That’s the decision that I’m struggling with. As long as I didn’t completely delete my Facebook account, I’d still be able to use Messenger to chat with those that I’m more closely connected with and I do want to continue linking my blog posts to Facebook as that’s where many of you find them and comment on them.
There are, of course, numerous other social media platforms, but none of them gobble up the time or cause me the frustration that Facebook does. I do have an Instagram account, but I mainly use it to look at what a few others have posted and seldom post anything myself. I also use WhatsApp to chat with a limited number of individuals and, although I’m no longer part of the professional world, I do have a LinkedIn account.
How would you describe your relationship with social media? Do you find it as frustrating as I do? How do you handle that?
For now, I’m going to continue attempting to curate my Facebook feed by unfollowing or blocking sites that frustrate me and I’m also going to try to set limits on how much time I spend on social media. Perhaps that will help.
Buying a Piece of Paris is a charming memoir about the Australian author’s humorous and challenging quest to find and purchase an apartment in Paris. With only two weeks to locate and secure the apartment of her dreams, something exuding character and Parisian chic, Ellie embarks on what seems an almost impossible pursuit. Armed with only a cursory grasp of the language, she finds herself trying to navigate the bewildering French real estate market with its unique customs, quirky agents, and unexpected cultural hurdles. All in all, a very entertaining read and especially so since, although I’ve only spent five days in Paris, I could visualize many of the places that she mentioned and the kind of buildings she visited in her frantic and sometimes hilarious search for the perfect place to call home.
After moving with her husband to the tiny, bustling city of Macau, across the Pearl River delta from Hong Kong, Grace Miller finds herself a stranger in a very foreign land. Facing the devastating news of her infertility and a marriage in crisis, Grace resolves to do something bold, something that her impetuous mother might have done. Turning to her love of baking, she opens Lillian’s, a café specializing in coffee, tea, and delicate French macarons. In this story of love, friendship, and renewal, Lillian’s quickly becomes a sanctuary where women from different cultural backgrounds come together to support one another.
I used to think that dressing for Christmas events meant putting together festive outfits that incorporated sequins, glitter, metallics, satiny fabrics or velvet in holiday colours like red, green, or gold. But what if that’s not you? If glitz and glam is your thing, then by all means, indulge your inner princess, but if it’s not, don’t try to be someone you’re not. I’m here to tell you that dressing for the holidays shouldn’t turn you into a completely different person. Instead, consider your style personality, how you like to dress the rest of the year, then elevate it slightly to make it appropriate for the holiday events you’ll be attending. 
When Jennifer Connolly of 
There’s a great debate in neuroendocrine cancer circles over the use of the zebra as our symbol. At one extreme are patients, usually women, who show up at meetings and conferences decked out from head to toe in zebra stripes and who refer to one another as fellow zebras. On the other side of the debate, the world’s best known and most highly revered patient advocate is so opposed to the idea that he doesn’t allow anything zebra on his social media sites. He thinks that it’s an infantile gimmick that trivializes the grave nature of our disease and that it’s actually detrimental as an awareness tool.
Following Augustine 