MY RAMBLING STREAM OF THOUGHTS ABOUT FACEBOOK

What I write here is a rambling stream of thoughts about my time on Facebook. While I've missed contact with my many friends on the site, my thus far short break has been a relief, and I've felt better during the time away. I doubt I can return to FB on the same basis as previously. I was spending far too much there, and, in the end, I was suffering stress from overload. If I could post and pretty much ignore comments, that could work, but I can't. I want to monitor comments to make sure the discussions don't drift into attacks and name-calling on my page.

Also, when my friends take the trouble to read and comment, I feel obliged to return the compliment and read and comment on their pages. Thus, the time problem, and, in the end, Facebook became more of a burden than a pleasure.

Since I've always preferred blogging to Facebook, I'm thinking of taking my writing back to my blog and putting links to my blog posts on FB. A number of my friends will probably not read the posts, and that's okay. Unfortunately, people who have not joined Google tell me they can't leave comments on Blogger. It seems Google has taken over Blogger, and I don't know how to solve the problem. Still, I feel much more comfortable blogging than posting on FB.

I've pretty much made my decision because of the relief I already feel from spending less time and being less active on FB, but it's not set in stone. If I go back to my old ways of posting and commenting on FB, I'll probably soon suffer from stress overload again.

MY HEART BLEEDS FOR THEM

From Yahoo Finance:

Andrew Schiff was sitting in a traffic jam in California this month after giving a speech at an investment conference about gold. He turned off the satellite radio, got out of the car and screamed a profanity.
....

Schiff, 46, is facing another kind of jam this year: Paid a lower bonus, he said the $350,000 he earns, enough to put him in the country's top 1 percent by income, doesn't cover his family's private-school tuition, a Kent, Connecticut, summer rental and the upgrade they would like from their 1,200-square- foot Brooklyn duplex.
....

The smaller bonus checks that hit accounts across the financial-services industry this month are making it difficult to maintain the lifestyles that Wall Street workers expect, according to interviews with bankers and their accountants, therapists, advisers and headhunters.

"People who don't have money don't understand the stress," said Alan Dlugash, a partner at accounting firm Marks Paneth & Shron LLP in New York who specializes in financial planning for the wealthy. "Could you imagine what it's like to say I got three kids in private school, I have to think about pulling them out? How do you do that?" (My emphasis)

Heaven's no! Working folks who must manage without huge salaries and bonuses DO NOT understand the stress of people with incomes of $350,000 or more, when each month they may be challenged to pay for the necessities of life such as food, housing, and health care and perhaps some months be forced to do without one or the other of the necessities.

What the stressed-out high earners may have to give up:

$7,500 a year for a golf club membership
$30,000 a year for a peer-learning group for investors
$32,000-a-year for a daughter's prep school tuition

Mark Brunson, who blogs at Enough About Me, sent me the link and thought at first, as I did, that the article was satire, but indeed the article is serious.