I’ve been contemplating suicide for a while now. Every morning I wake up and wonder ‘should I do it today?’ I have been reading up on it you know, about people who have taken the plunge. They all make it sound so easy. Still I hang on.
I wonder if Farmville will work in office today. Life makes sense around lost cows and harvests. But no — Fortiguard Web Filtering is in action again. There’s no meaning to be found here Sisyphus, it’s time to head to SuicideMachine.org for the 150th time this week.
My hand hovers over the mouse. ‘Click here to sign out forever’ — the purple banner mocks me. ‘You want your actual life back?’ it jeers. Should I just do it: kill my Facebook account and commit a painless, one-click virtual suicide. If I can’t play Facebook games and absolutely hate the networking, what good is an online life?
It’s a curious coincidence that I became part of the social networking world a day after a colleague wrote a story on Seppukoo.com that, like the new SuicideMachine, “kills” your Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn and Twitter accounts at a go. Seppukoo equates it to the Japanese tradition of an honourable suicide.
Like a good commitment phobe, I found my way out before I dared to go in. I must confess though, it’s been a great ride. Since I signed up in November, I found old friends, poked my best friend on an hourly basis for a month, looked at a 100,000 photographs of 10,000 people, followed Shah Rukh Khan on Twitter and found music on MySpace — but what next? Day before yesterday I had 81 friends, today I have 80. Should I go mad trying to figure out who de-friended me? Do I even care? Making matters worse is that annoying Buzz icon in my once simple Gmail inbox — it’s telling me there are 28 updates from my “followers”. How do I switch it off?
{{/usCountry}}Like a good commitment phobe, I found my way out before I dared to go in. I must confess though, it’s been a great ride. Since I signed up in November, I found old friends, poked my best friend on an hourly basis for a month, looked at a 100,000 photographs of 10,000 people, followed Shah Rukh Khan on Twitter and found music on MySpace — but what next? Day before yesterday I had 81 friends, today I have 80. Should I go mad trying to figure out who de-friended me? Do I even care? Making matters worse is that annoying Buzz icon in my once simple Gmail inbox — it’s telling me there are 28 updates from my “followers”. How do I switch it off?
{{/usCountry}}The idea of a virtual suicide — that doesn’t just delete your account, but de-friends you, removes awful wall posts you’ve left, erases strange party tags — now that’s empowering. Just the knowledge that I am not stuck with a virtual identity and a friend-count for the rest of my life makes me feel above the 65 million users of Facebook and 18 million on Twitter.
My daily contemplation of virtual suicide, for all its angst, is my everyday dose of existentialism, because I have the choice to leave, for now I chose to stay and get seduced by the social networking world. And by the time virtual suicides become a rage; I’ll be a pro at allnetworkerzunited.com.