“Thank goodness for Facebook.” There’s a thought that has crossed a lot of minds. I know I’ve had this moment: dead cellphone suffocating your plans or lost numbers keeping you out of touch. Maybe you’ve got no info on your study group except one dude’s last name, so where do you turn? Oh, right, the social hub everyone visits constantly that can be accessed from virtually any location. What a miracle. You ever have one of these moments, a Facebook Miracle Moment?

Now compare that to the number of times you’ve reflexively hit the letter “F” on your computer’s keyboard as soon as a new browser window has popped up, followed by spending thirty minutes in a half-coma learning fun facts about your buddies’ Thursday night. What a nightmare.

It seems to me that the powers that be expend an awful lot of energy educating me about the dangers of drugs and alcohol. When they aren’t doing that, they peer-pressure me using vague, questionably accurate statistics that inform me of just how few dopes engage in destructive vice X (and inversely, what a huge crowd doesn’t). From hallways to stairwells to toilet stalls we’re absolutely inundated with these monochrome, bullying posters, and I have yet to see one about Facebook. I’m serious.

Dictionary.com defines addiction as: “The state of being enslaved to a habit, or practice, or to something that is psychologically or physically habit-forming.” Fits the bill.  Now, I know many people will think of “addiction” and Facebook and scoff. The image of addiction isn’t complete without a physical component or the experience of withdrawal. But don’t discredit my point just yet.

You are getting the lines between addiction and dependency blurred. The latter refers to the physical, chemical necessity that our bodies develop when certain substances are regularly introduced. The former refers to a psychological component that can be described as simply as “a really bad habit that gets in the way of other important things.” Enjoying marijuana is another pastime that never causes dependency but can be profoundly addictive.

I don’t mean to shock with this comparison, I just aim to call a spade what it is. An addiction doesn’t need to give you the chills or make your nose bleed in order to damage the quantity and variation of activities you could be filling your time with. It just has to pull off that little trick where it sits in the back of your mind, very quietly, all the time, so that just when there’s nothing else on your mind, it jumps to center stage before anything else can.

Think about it. What do you do when you’ve run out of things to do on your computer and you want to kill time? Most honest answers probably don’t include shutting down the laptop and moving around a little.

I don’t mean to burn Zuckerberg at the stake here. I don’t even mean to criticize Facebook. An activity can be both useful and addictive. So don’t think I want you to quit, or hate or never touch social networking again. But if you consider yourself a person who can live free of addiction, try taking a break. Try not instinctively hitting the “F” key in the blank URL bar for just a couple of days and see what happens to your mind. Better yet, see what happens to your free time.