Meet the 120 friends you probably don't need in your life anymore.

By BERN MORLEY.

What would you do if Facebook disappeared tomorrow? Would it shatter your world or like me, would it almost come as a welcome relief?

Because lately, I’ve been starting to see it as less of a friendly online community and more of, well, a troublemaker. There are so many ways it can screw with perfectly normal people and perfectly normal lives.

If the loosely related biopic “The Social Network” is to be believed, Mark Zuckerberg himself originally only started the whole thing to stalk/engage with his ex-girlfriend and really, it hasn’t graduated much past that for many people using it.

I for one am starting to question its place in not only my world, but also the modern world in general.

Sure, it has its benefits and it helps many of us connect with friends, family and like-minded people we’d otherwise lose touch with but really, in what capacity are we actually engaging? 100 messages on my Facebook wall for my birthday are lovely and all but really, for a lot of us, it is nothing more than a token gesture. I’m as guilty as the next person, popping up a funny pic or jovial greeting instead of doing what I once would have done, and should really do, which is pick up the phone and have a (gasp) CONVERSATION.

And let’s not forget the FOMO (fear of missing out) it creates. The anxiety so many of us feel when we see our of friends having an amazing, action packed Saturday night at dinner parties and mingling with fabulous people while we’re sitting on the couch eating cheezels off our fingers and watching The Breakfast Club.

It’s making so many people think that their own lives are far too ordinary and worse, doubt their very own existence.

Another negative is that it is creating a generation of ‘hate readers’. People who sit and lurk, inwardly scoffing and anonymously commenting on other people’s status’.

Or reading articles purely because they know it will enrage them, with some going on to anonymously troll said articles in the FB comments.

I have been threatened on many an occasion for having written certain articles, as have my colleagues, yet I am SURE these people would not be brave enough to threaten to, and I quote “rape me in my sleep” were they to meet me face to face.

It’s amazing how tough some people can be behind the guise of anonymity and a keyboard.

Yet, we all have that inner voyeur in us and I think Facebook completely enables us to do this without hesitation. If I wanted to stalk an ex boyfriend (hypothetically) when I was 18, I’d have to go sit outside his house in my car with my girlfriends and wait for him to emerge from his home. Now with the help of Facebook, we’ve become better at tracing someone’s movements than the FBI.

It has also brought about a lot of friendship fallouts that in the real world perhaps, would not happen organically. Sometimes this has been for the best, especially when we realise we are inadvertently friends with racists and bigots or even worse, intentional Croc wearers.

But a lot of the time people are reporting that a small miscommunication has ended lifelong friendships. This has left them inexplicably “unfriended” and desperately confused. What ever happened to the good old days when people stopped talking to each other because you didn’t invite their kids to the wedding reception?

Let’s also not forget that Facebook is responsible for many the marriage and relationship breakdown with many “old flames” being reignited. Yet, it has to be said, people ruin relationships, not Facebook. Facebook just makes it a whole lot easier.

All of it’s starting to make my world feel a little darker and I’m starting to question my own part in it.

My point here and my question to you is this:  Is Facebook nothing more than an unnecessary complication in our lives? That besides being the ultimate time-suck, does it just create more problems than it solves? Or would you be totally lost without it?