One of my favorite exes used to put her hand over my mouth, just before I was about to say something monumentally stupid. (She could guess most of the time.)
It made me more socially productive.
I can therefore entirely sympathize with Maneesh Sethi, a San Francisco blogger who believes that he needs to be less socially networked and more capitalistically productive.
So, as he says on his own Hack The System blog, he went on Craigslist and hired someone who would slap him every time he veered toward Facebook. Yes, slap him in the face.
Sethi, you see, is a blogger who is interested in being more productive in his life. Hiring the slapper seemed to him entirely rational.
He felt he was spending too much time on Facebook and Reddit -- some 6 hours a day, it seems. He had the need to achieve.
Having hired Kara on Craigslist earlier this year -- he says a mere 20 people responded to this posting, which is not the San Francisco I know -- he discovered that this pain-for-gain method worked for him.
He has since repeated it, but told the Huffington Post that it was best when a stranger hit him. Perhaps a stranger doesn't pull her punches.
I wonder, though, whether this is actually an exercise in pain at all.
For some people, being slapped is a pleasure. Ah, you know those people too, do you? Well, here is another video (embedded below) that shows Sethi being slapped repeatedly by random people (mostly women) in Colombia.
During this video he declares: "You know, I can be slapped by women all night long. It doesn't really hurt at all."
One can only conclude, therefore, that the best way to wean yourself away from Facebook is to have something more pleasurable occurring.
I am told that Craigslist is, indeed, always the preeminent place for securing that.
(In the video below, Sethi gets slaphappy at 3:53.)