Beyond the Blog

If you are reading this, you may have had to look a little harder to find it. The T3 blog will no longer be published on Facebook. No new content will be shared on Twitter either. After ten years, my relationship with social media has come to an abrupt and rocky ending. I must admit; we had some good times. While I never truly embraced Twitter, I am just enough of a narcissist to really enjoy Facebook. It’s nice to think that I have thousands of friends, even if I’ve never met most of them. 

I expect I’ll get a few less people reading my blog. On the other hand, my non table tennis friends won’t be flooded with friend requests from Mumbai. I’m willing to live with the tradeoff, knowing that anyone who clicks on a T3 post now either really wanted to read it or is a hacker. I originally began writing posts in order to draw traffic to the T3 website. With more exposure, it would be possible to get more customers for my coaching business. That’s where the big money is. Okay, that’s where some money is. The initial goal of getting some internet exposure was met years ago. Consistent addition of content has proved to be more than enough to advertise coaching. Any search for a table tennis coach in the Atlanta area should prominently display my website near the top of the first page. 

Writing blog posts has never been a chore. I could certainly get by writing less if I was only doing it for advertising. I find writing to be therapeutic, and a great outlet for pent up sarcasm. I’ll need that outlet more than ever now that I’m off Facebook. I wasn’t kicked off of Facebook. I’ve been able to cloak any controversial statements in a maze of ping pong jargon. I’ve known for a long time that I was spending too much time and emotional energy with my “friends.” I’ve been off for a week now and feel like a burden has been lifted. Apparently, I’m not capable of being a casual user. My account should be completely gone within thirty days. 

While it may not seem like a big decision for there to be one less person on social media, it may be that I’m not the only one. In the end, it wasn’t my thousands of table tennis friends that prompted this decision; it was my longtime friends. Casual comments were used like daggers and were truly heartbreaking. I’m completely at peace with parting ways with social media. I think the conversations had taken an ugly turn; and the arbiters of these conversations couldn’t be trusted. 

It’s a funny thing about lying. You can lie by what you don’t say, just as much as you can lie by what you do say…..