Social suicide?

I can’t imagine life without Facebook. I use it to stay in touch with friends, organise my events, keep track of endless invites to birthdays, parties, launches etc. It helps, right? Well, not necessarily. Recently, I’ve been trying to keep track of how much time I spend on Facebook and the stats were quite sobering! It turns out, some days I spend as much as one whole hour of my evening using social media. This is time I could be spending taking a walk or having coffee with a friend offline. (I still find it weird this is an actual word. I always thought that you either meet up with someone or meet online. Now it turns out we have to be more specific!)

Anyway, for those of you feeling particularly adventurous, I recommend the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine. In the words of its creators: “This machine lets you delete all your energy sucking social-networking profiles, kill your fake virtual friends, and completely do away with your Web2.0 alter ego.”

Apart from telling you that erasing your online friends will not kill them in real life, the website provides some stats:
• Based on the figures they provide, I have calculated that the Web 2.0 Suicide Machine will save you approximately 90% of the time spent effecting a more manual, err . . . death
• Online suiciders reported that their lives have improved by an approximate average of 25%

The latter point is shocking. Is that really the case? Would I really be approximately 25% happier if I erased my profiles? This, in turn, would mean that the modern human lives, on average, 20% below their possible happiness level!

Does that sound right? Are we all missing out on some ‘Zen’?