Hey Facebook, do you have to keep rubbing it in my face?

Remember Facebook’s “Friends Day”? Of course you do, it was yesterday and the ream of personalised celebration videos it spawned are probably still clogging up your news feed.

Don’t get me wrong, I quite enjoyed seeing a random handful of my friends smiling up at me from my computer screen, just like I enjoy the occasional “memory” cropping up in my feed, but I’m an oddly sentimental type.

At face value, the idea behind Friends Day is both simple and sort of nice – to “celebrate and reflect on the importance of connecting” while Facebook simultaneously celebrates its birthday. I mean, who doesn’t like friends and birthdays, are you some kind of monster?

“When people connect, powerful things happen and lives are changed,” the company explained in a blog post.

“We see this on Facebook every day, whether it’s an exchange with an old friend that brings a smile to your face or a new connection that changes your life path, or even the world.”

Hooray for friends! Let’s hear it for Facebook! Yeah!

Ahem.

The problem with Friends Day, is that an algorithm can’t possibly capture the nuance of human connectedness and while the result can occasionally be hilarious (for eg. when your mum is in your pile of closest friends, I mean, clearly a mistake, duh), it can also be devastating.

We all know that a significant portion of our lives are now lived in digital space (the RSI in my scrolling thumb could have told me that), in fact somedays I’d wager I spend more time chatting to my friends on Facebook than I do face-to-face.

I also work there, get my news there, buy clothes there, stalk vague acquaintances there and actually, pretty much just hang out there whenever I risk spending more than a few seconds alone with my own thoughts.

Even so, that doesn’t mean I like to be reminded of my scary dependence on social media by a chirpy bouquet and a saccharine greeting each morning.

As we increasingly dump even the minutiae of our lives into the ether of cyber space, it can be vaguely comforting to know it’s all stored somewhere (in a don’t ever, ever think about it or read 1984 kind of way).

I mean, do you remember what you were doing on this day last year? Or the year before that? Or even five years ago?

Probably not, but Facebook does! And here it is to creepily cheerfully reminisce with you the moment you flick open your laptop.

Some memories of the Mamamia staff better left buried:

Sure, sometimes it’s nice to be reminded of that hilarious quip you made or how glad you are that puberty is over (very, amirite?), but sometimes — just like life, really — the algorithm throws up something tragic or triggering or just plain mundane and you’d much prefer to get on with your deep dive into the digital history of your neighbour’s cousin’s sister’s ex’s dog.

Thanks for trying though, Zuckerberg.