I first joined Facebook in 2006. Before that, I was on MySpace (which was where I met my husband, though I tell everyone that I got him on eBay). I tried Twitter for a while. Mastodon, Substack, BlueSky…I’ve been very very very social for a very long time!
And now I am over it.
Between the endless squabbling, the clickbait, the stupid ads, the scammers, the people who don’t know how to Internet reposting the scammers’ crap, people who don’t know how to formulate their own thoughts reposting thinly-veiled cries for attention disguised as inspirational platitudes, people with no critical thinking skills reposting alarmist bullshit, the algorithms counting my clicks so as to corral me into a “more personalized experience” (i.e., “echo chamber”) in which I’ll be happy to “interact with more content” (i.e. “obey the ads”), and now AI scraping everyone’s stuff to rework it into soulless, substandard plagiarism, I am…just…over it.
Don’t even get me started on the community group page for my little town. Seriously, people, take it outside! Touch grass while you’re calling each other names! If you have to fling poop, at least do it in person over the back fence! The winner gets a discount on having their vents cleaned or their siding power-washed! (Which you’ll need, after all that poop-flinging.)
Yes, it was a lot of good fun for a long time, but these days I can have the same amount of fun perusing the news, at least until I hit the paywalls.
Speaking of which, I’m also tired of creating free content for rich people so they can keep us addicted to their marketing blargh.
I deactivated my Facebook account about a month ago. I’m on BlueSky but I don’t really post; I just like seeing what other artists and writers are up to. While I have never Tikked a Tok, I still have my YouTube channel, though it’s a little dusty.
They say that doomscrolling through everyone else’s carefully curated posts about their interesting and exciting lives (“Here we are at Cracker Barrel! The baby threw up! So cute!”) makes you feel bad about your own life. Really? Maybe you need to rethink your aspirations. If anything, social media has helped me realize that the world inside my head is way more interesting than anything the world outside my head has to offer. Personal connections online are tenuous at best, and I don’t remember the last time I had a satisfying conversation in the digital Agora.
I’d like to say that I long for Face Time instead of Facebook, but even that’s becoming more and more like being stuck in a newsfeed, except with a lot more smiling and nodding and eye-contact. I think the social-media culture has trained us to treat every interaction like a talent show or something. In-person socializing now often just feels like polite competition: a collection of one-person acts angling for the spotlight, trying to see who can stay on stage the longest while the audience kind of wishes there was a “Like” button to click, or a “Heart” for the real tearjerker monologues, so they’d wrap it up and someone else can have a turn. But we wait patiently, wishing we could just check our phones while they’re talking. It’s hard to create and maintain deep connections with anyone anymore. (I think I have another blog post brewing about how listening has become a lost art, but you probably don’t want to hear about that. Besides, the AI content farms have already plagiarized that topic to death.)
Does this sound like a pity party? Vaguebooking? Emo edge-lord posting? I hope not. I’m honestly relieved to finally shift my perspective away from society-in-general and quit worrying so much about whether or not anyone cares what I say and do. I’m starting to break out of the habit of re-formatting every amusing or profound thought into another perfect, pithy post. I no longer feel the urge to come up with captions for every photograph I take. I can enjoy the satisfaction of a finished painting without jumping right up to post pics and judge my work by how many “Likes” it collects.
I like attention and publicity as much as the next show-off. I still hope to sell some art one of these days, so I’m going to have to do some marketing here (blargh). I still hope people will read the novel I’ve almost finished writing. But it’s nice to have ample brain-space to focus on stuff that matters—the art, the writing, the building of real websites with real content, and whatever-the-hell-else I feel like working on, even if it turns out that it only matters to me.
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