Today Facebook went public, and according to Conan O’Brien it happened just as the last MySpace user just went private. Mark Zuckerberg just made a few billion dollars selling off parts of his company which was built on the Timeline of your life, and all the details of which you were willing to post. For nearly a decade we have been handing over the details of our lives (read: relinquishing ownership of the details of our lives) to a group of computer programmers in Silicon Valley who through strokes of genius devised a way to monetized your life to the 115 billionth degree. Impressive.

It’s been 26 days since I “deleted” my Facebook page. Okay, so as it turns out, you can’t really delete your Facebook page. It’s impossible to do so (as far as I can tell) (Turns out you can delete it, just go here. It is now scheduled to self-destruct in 14 days.) So, I simply deactivated my account. Still residing on the mammoth servers that are Facebook are all of those pictures I posted, that friends posted (remember that one from Spring Break ’98 that you regret?), conversations about politics and religion that led to nasty exchanges and words you wish you could take back, places you checked in to complete with who was there, details of relationships gone bad, even those baby pictures your mom thought would be wonderful to throw out there… all cryogenically frozen in time on the interwebs, locked in this portal known as Facebook.

Which is a little creepy, right?

Relinquishing the rights of the life I posted on Facebook was only part of the reason for stepping away from Facebook. As Tracy and I have prepared for the immanent arrival of our daughter we have been thinking through the many implications of relinquishing the rights of our lives and now the life of our daughter to these innovative computer programmers. And in all honesty, I don’t want anyone, anywhere owning the rights to images of my daughter.

In San Francisco children are kind of like unicorns. (We boast the lowest percentage of children of any urban environment in the United States–13.2%.) It’s not uncommon to see people snapping pictures of children (that may or may not be their own) and posting them on Facebook, Instagram, or Twitter. In some instances these kids become their own brand of celebrity, attaining a level of notoriety that was uncommon just 10 years ago. In fact because of social media, I know an awful lot about kids I’ve never met before–the kids of friends who are scattered across the country. I don’t want to craft an online persona for my daughter, like I have done with myself, I want her to be her own person the unique person that God has created–not the person that I try and create her to be. I don’t want her to attain a level of celebrity, I don’t want the first words from people’s mouths when they meet her to be, “I feel like I already know you!” I want her to be able to surprise people with her own unique personality.

Yes, my daughter is taking me away from Facebook. But hidden not so subtly throughout my reasoning is the reality that we craft an image of ourselves online that is not really who we are in real life. We post the highlights of our lives online for all to see and revel in our amazingness, our opportunities, the “famous” we get to meet/see and have our pictures taken with, our achievements and awards. The person I had become on Facebook was not the real me. That person never had a bad day, never felt the weight of stress and pressure, was alway happy, always reading, always thinking, always doing something fun… He was never sitting on the couch in a hoodie and gym shorts stuffing his face with potato chips and crying at a Liberty Mutual commercial (not that that ever happened or anything).

Martin Luther King Jr. once said, “We have allowed our technology to outrun our theology.” We all need to take some time and carefully weigh the price of technological innovation and progress in our lives and for a season I have chosen to deactivate my Facebook page to do just that. I am unsure how long this “fast” of sorts will last but I can say that after 26 days I don’t really miss the Facebook. Life goes on in the same way, and I’m actually enjoying it a little more.