Regaining Sanity, Vol. 1: Extricating Myself From Facebook

For quite a long time now I have danced around the knowledge that social media does bad things to me (and you)**.

I’ve ignored that fact for a long time now even though I am very well aware that my attention span has dwindled down to noth…oh look, it’s a cute puppy video that I must watch right now.

Yeah, like that.

My morning routine consists of drinking my first cup of coffee while scrolling through Facebook which never left me with a warm/fuzzy feeling afterwards.  Au contraire.  The happy mood I almost always wake up in would be replaced by feelings of annoyance or disgust or exasperation.  Those are the things I have been feeding myself for breakfast almost every day since about the mid-2009 when I joined Facebook. Wrap yourself around the fact that every single day I (you, they) voluntarily do something that does not fulfill or add to the the quality of life and instead diminishes it.

I have decided once and for all to do something about it.  To fight the addiction.  And I am not using that word in jest; social media addiction is real addiction.  And if you knew my family’s history with addictions (drugs, tobacco, alcohol, gambling, drama, victimhood) you would understand why that terrifies me.

I do my best to be very careful with myself. But this one’s got me in its clutches like it does a significant portion of the entire population.  For example, 72.4% of the entire US population has interacted at some level with Facebook*. That number makes me shift uncomfortably in my seat as if someone just said “…and I have this really delicious Kool Aid that all of us are going to drink right now”.
Because I work from home + have health conditions to keep me home, I have more time to peruse the Internet and more times than not that means a whole lot of Facebook and sometimes Twitter and Instagram.  What I find over and over is a bunch of mostly silly but sometimes fun nonsense (memes, etc), and an appalling amount of snark/sarcasm/cynicism/ad hoc attacks/vitriol (that, oddly, often gets directed at the silly but sometimes fun nonsense).  An entire populace subsisting on a steady diet of snark, snide, and pseudo-hip cynicism (thanks for the term, Camille Paglia).  Don’t get me started on politics & the e n d l e s s amount of posts that do nothing for anyone except to cause even more derision. Religion and faith?  Replaced by mockery and the worship of technology. Politics has reduced everyone to one label or another and the resultant hatred has caused a genuine loss of civility that I wonder if we’ll ever get back.  I can't help but wonder if people are really laying in bed at night feeling content that they posted that meme about Trump or Hillary...is that really what you want the gift of your life to be reduced to? Worse are the people who post about kindness and caring about those around them...unless, of course, that person voted for the wrong candidate in their slacktivist estimation.  Being an uplifter has been replaced by being a cowardly disparaging bully who hides behind a computer screen reveling in the delusion that they are somehow clever and cunning.  Everyone is offended by the most trivial of things and no one is really free to express their real opinions anymore because they will almost certainly get attacked for them.
With some puppy videos and delicious recipes thrown in for good measure.


I have seen too many people I know personally with good and interesting minds waste their intelligence and wit (the real kind, not the sarcastic kind) on being Facebook Fabulous; posting inane and/or derisive and sometimes disturbing stuff in some kind of Orwellian or Kafkaesque or Rod Serling-ish (or Zuckerbergian?) popularity contest in which the person who can get the most people to spend a nanosecond clicking a button (Like!)…wins.  Your guess is as good as mine as to what the actual prize is.

Yet we all keep coming back again and again and again.  I see posts on Facebook by people accusing others of being sheeple and the irony of that is not lost on me. 


via GIPHY

I can’t keep drinking the Kool Aid, folks.  I can’t keep feeding my own good and interesting mind this constant stream of tripe and drivel. 

I was reading something this morning on the topic of reducing social media usage and someone in a comment said that their goal was to not waste their summer on social media.  This hit home for me because it made me think about how much time I wasted this past summer perusing Facebook, etc.

Time I cannot get back.

Time I could have been doing a myriad of worthwhile things that fed and nurtured my mind, not starved or otherwise harmed it.

*http://www.internetworldstats.com/facebook.htm
**Please don't repeat the worn statement that Facebook, et al. helps keep the connection with friends and family.  There were deep and meaningful relationships before the inception of social media.