Deleting Your Facebook Doesn’t Make You Irrelevant

A friend of mine recently deleted her Facebook page. Her decision was met with widespread concern, as if she were forever blotting her existence from the annals of history. “Nobody will know anything about you anymore,” one worried friend said. “And you’ll become totally irrelevant.” It’s this kind of flawed logic – the more people know about you, the more relevant you are – that has caused a pandemic of reckless over-sharing, especially by our generation.

Perhaps I’m being a little dramatic, but I’m not the only one who feels this way. Intel’s 2012 “Mobile Etiquette” survey revealed that 90% of American adults think people over-share information online. At the same time, a Harvard University study found that talking about ourselves strokes the reward and pleasure centers of the brain. So, we’re all narcissists; it’s just other people’s self-disclosure that we hate. Unfortunately, it’s the golden age of self-disclosure. The internet constantly deludes us into believing that every facet of our personal lives, every photo we take, and every thought that crosses our mind deserves an audience. Frankly, it’d be nice if there were a little bit of mystery left in personal interaction; if we could meet a person for the first time and not already know, based on their social media footprint, what they eat, who they voted for, and what inspiring Confucius quote they have tattooed on their hip.

We can’t stop the deluge of information, but maybe we can curb the rampant spread of over-sharing by embracing reticence and learning to cherish our secrets. Secrets get a bad rap, especially in this day and age, when endlessly purging heaps of information about ourselves and the people we know is encouraged as catharsis. Keeping secrets means you’re ashamed. Refusing to engage in a round of TMI means you’re standoffish. Censoring one’s self is a big no-no, because it’s apparently destructive to have a filter between “things that happened” and “things I should tell everyone about.” People actually boast about their lives being an open book.  But if being an open book is something to celebrate, then so should being clandestine; it’s the opposite extreme, but it has fewer consequences. I’m not advocating that we all become paranoid recluses and start hoarding a bunch of malignant secrets that slowly destroy our psyches – just setting up a perimeter around our personal lives that can’t be breached. The details of our extracurricular activities, the stories of our escapades and misadventures, and all the photographic evidence that accompanies it were once things that we shared only with our close inner circle of trusted confidantes, not 600 of our closest Facebook friends – most of whom we haven’t seen in a decade.

This kind of reserve has its benefits: The less people know about you, the more questions they’ll ask. Being elusive will not be the death knell to your social life. If anything, people will refer to you as “enigmatic” and talk about your “aura of mystique.” When no one knows anything about you, they will likely fill in the mundane details of your life with conjectures that are far more interesting. It’s the difference between “her boyfriend’s name is Roger. He’s a bounty hunter. She posted pictures of them at Outback Steakhouse this weekend” and “No one really knows anything about her. I heard she went backpacking in Bhutan with some Icelandic rock star.”

Live a rich life and keep many secrets. Being candid is not necessarily a virtue, but being discreet definitely is. Save your intimate stories for your memoirs or your eponymous reality show. At least then, you’ll be getting paid for your indiscretion.