Escape From Facebook

It didn’t happen overnight. The thought had been fermenting in my mind for a long time. Seeds were planted during heated political arguments I’ve had with friends of mine over the past 10 years. Arguments that got out of control and became personal. I lost a good friend to one of them. We’re still connected on Facebook — she didn’t unfriend me or anything, and she even sent me a gift when we adopted M. — but the damage was done. I’ve known her since the second grade and experienced a lot of things with her, including the deaths of two friends we grew up with, and now we don’t speak. It’s sad, and it’s mostly my fault because I chose what to post and it escalated. My apologies fell on deaf ears. That was what, 9 years ago? I lost track.

I remember when I was married, Ex would sometimes complain that I was posting on Facebook when I said I was working late, instead of coming home and having dinner with her. In reality, I viewed my Facebook posts as work breaks. Mental snacks. It takes me one minute to write even a long post, but to her, it must have looked like I spent hours on there, which is understandable. Regardless, she had a point, and it was a sign of a problem in our marriage. If I was being honest with myself, I would have understood that I didn’t want to go home because I was miserable. I was happier in my office. Facebook was an escape. A way to connect with people who knew and loved me, a way to feel some kind of personal connection while my marriage was spiraling down the drain. Facebook was this future divorced person’s soft, warm blankee.

During the Trump years I was prolific in posting rants, screeds, criticisms of the Orange Pig on Facebook. More active than I’ve ever been. Once again, it was more about therapy than anything else. I needed to get that shit out of me and do it publicly. It was cathartic. On some level, I also felt I was doing my patriotic duty because I viewed (and still view) him as a dangerous criminal who needed to be called out repeatedly. Miraculously, in 4 years, only one person unfriended me, a QAnon nutjob from law school whom I didn’t know well. Before that, other friends told me to unfriend her but I refused because I don’t believe in unfriending people based on their political views. That would be hypocritical. When she got really personal and offensive with her comments a couple of times, I told her that it was my page and if she wanted to do that, she needed to do it on her own page, or I’d delete any comment that I thought was attacking someone or offensive. She didn’t listen, and when I finally deleted one of her offensive comments from my page, she unfriended me. Plenty of other people muted me, which is a passive-aggressive form of unfriending.

My last active posting was on, and immediately after, January 6th, when thousands of organized domestic terrorists, urged on by the Orange Pig, raided the Capitol Building, physically threatened congressional leaders, and tried to overthrow the election. Real banana republic type stuff, but it was serious, at least to me. Still, apart from a few of my politically-similar friends, a lot of people didn’t seem to care. It was just another day at the office. Instead, what I got was “Whatabout the BLM protests????” Disingenuous, ridiculous, bad faith whataboutism. As if the two causes were remotely the same. As if the two protests were remotely the same. One was based on racial justice after a black man (many many black men) was executed in cold blood by a police officer. The other was an organized sacking of the Capitol Building based on a massive fucking lie. One was a mostly peaceful protest where a few people opportunistically took advantage and committed crimes against real estate property. It was later discovered that some of the crimes, including the killing of a police officer, were committed by right-wing saboteurs like Steven Carillo, Boogaloo Boi Ivan Hunter, and the Umbrella Man in Minnesota. The other was anything but peaceful. It was violent and intended to be violent, as anyone with eyes in their head could see on television that day.

Around that time, I started to seriously ask myself:

Why am I here? Why am I posting so much? What’s the point of all this arguing? Who am I trying to convince? If people really don’t give a shit and are so stupid that they’re comparing this to BLM, why do I care? If this country is really this politically lost that people can’t recognize a major, growing threat when they see one, and instead revert to knee-jerk political tribalism, maybe let the whole thing burn. Fuck it.

Maybe for the first time since I joined Facebook over a decade ago, I took an honest look at my motivations and those of other people who use it. Why do people post? What do they post? There’s no universal rule, of course. Everyone is different. But I found that Facebook posts could be broken down into five categories: (1) Political or social opinion, (2) Look how great my life is, (3) I’m miserable, please feel sorry for me, (4) Asking for a donation or to promote a business or cause, (5) Just saying “hello”/celebrating/lamenting something unique, like a birthday, first day of school, wedding, birth, or death in the family. I also discovered that the LESS someone posted, the more likely it was to be Category 5, which to me, was the least annoying, ego-driven, and self-promoting use of Facebook. They are not mutually exclusive. Sometimes they overlap. Over 12 years, I fell into each of these categories at different points in time.

The bottom line is Facebook is 99.99% ego driven and performative. I suppose this is in the nature of social interaction, but there’s something about how we do it on a website, how we decide what to share and what not to share with intention and aforethought, that makes it more like personal marketing and branding than if we were talking with someone face to face, where someone can read the other person’s eyes and facial expression, ask questions, and dig a little deeper beyond “Everything in my life is grand! Check out my sandy toes on this beach!”

Or, if all you do is complain, avoid you entirely.

After January 6th, I also started reading about how Facebook’s algorithms work and how Facebook controls what people see and hear on the site. In short, it directs people towards conflict and their own echo chambers. The more outlandish, divisive, and popular the “story,” the more clicks a story or article generates, the more Facebook wants us to see it because it means more eyeballs and advertising revenue for Facebook. Truth is irrelevant. Lies are irrelevant. To Facebook it’s all about the eyeballs. To their credit, Trump, Kushner, and Parscale made great use of this in 2016. They were visionaries. They understood how many people were on Facebook and how they could motivate voters with the right kinds of political stories. As the old adages say: (1) A lie can travel half way around the world while the truth is putting on its shoes; and (2) Repeat a lie often enough and it becomes the truth. The Orange Pig is a master at this. He’s a goddamn Lie Ninja because he’s been doing it his entire life.

So sometime last June I reached a point of wanting to reduce my Facebook footprint and disengage from it as much as possible. It was a lot like my decision to stop eating meat 6 years ago. At first, it was like, “Let me see how long I can go doing this (not posting). Let me see how little I need it.” After a few weeks passed, I felt really good about not posting. Like really good. The more time that passed since my last post, the better I felt. I took a certain pride in it. Which I guess is kind of weird. Maybe this is the same feeling an alcoholic has not drinking. I think it’s fair to say that the dopamine hits I got from Likes or compliments or comments or winning arguments (at least in my head) and showing the world how “smart” and “well informed” I am (at least in my head) was addictive. It absolutely is addictive. One clue to this is in 12 years I probably visited someone else’s Facebook page less than 20 times. Other than photos or certain comments that came up on my notifications, on which I would comment, I almost never affirmatively visited someone else’s page. It was always about MY page, MY posts, MY opinions. Fucking egomaniac.

None of this is healthy or good. And man, what a time suck Facebook is. A massive time suck. Why? Because apart from one’s own posts, you have to keep up with everyone else’s posts, especially birthdays, special events, kids’ accomplishments, surgeries, deaths, births, etc., etc., etc. If you don’t “like” something that’s really important to someone else, they notice, trust me. They absolutely notice. So paying attention to people and giving them that social left click and interacting with them at appropriate times is necessary to avoid becoming perceived as an uncaring asshole. The more Facebook friends you have, the more you have to do to remain in social good standing and receive likes and interactions of your own when something good or bad happens to you or someone you care about. All of this creates a huge social pressure time loop that never existed when the only people with whom you interacted in life were the ones you really cared about: your family and immediate friends, not people you haven’t seen since high school, or have never actually met in person.

Yes, this all sounds profoundly dickish and antisocial. I know. But I speak the truth.

I still visit Facebook occasionally, and I post occasionally. I have not deleted my account. I am still on Facebook Messenger. People can still reach out and touch me when they really want to. But reducing my Facebook footprint by 95% percent has had the following benefits, which I would like to convey to anyone who is similarly considering weaning themselves off the Facebook teat:

1. Reducing your Facebook output forces you to take an honest look at yourself and be more intentional about what you’re posting and why. Slowing down and thinking before acting is generally a good thing in life. In my experience, too much of anything and bang bang social media activity typically leads to regret. This process, much like my decision to stop eating meat, has forced me to stop and think about what I’m doing before I do it. Does something really need to be said? (Does that really need to go into my mouth?) Do I have other options? Will the impact of this be positive or negative? What am I adding here? Who is it for? Being disciplined and leaving myself the space to stop and think before I post has been a very useful behavior that I’m trying to replicate in other parts of my life.
2. Controlling social expectations is a beautiful thing. Probably the best aspect of escaping Facebook is that I no longer feel the need to “Like” something or respond to something posted by someone else. Instead of logging in every day and ritually responding to people’s posts out a sense of obligation or social pressure, I can completely ignore 99.99% of what I see and respond only to what I want to. When you post once every 4-6 weeks and don’t log in every day, no one expects daily interaction, nor should they. Things will get missed. Likewise, I can’t expect as many people to “Like” or interact with my rare posts. No one gets offended this way, and my social interactions have reverted to normal. I interact offline with the people I know best who really want to stay in touch, and I no longer feel the need to engage in an hour-long political pissing contest with people I will never see in person again in my lifetime. It’s beautiful.
3. Man, I know a lot of self-absorbed people. Disclaimer: I do not exempt myself from this. When I was actively posting on Facebook for years, I was ego-driven and absolutely self-absorbed. Now that I’ve slowed down, I can see this in other people far more starkly than I ever noticed it in myself. I’m wary of being too specific here in case some of them see this, but holy fuck. Every kid’s birthday, every concert, every restaurant outing, every special plate of food, every European city visited, every medical visit, every airport departure, every mundane pet activity, every accomplishment no matter how minor. Everything. It makes you wonder, does anything get exempted? Is there anything those people choose not to post about? What would happen if they didn’t post about one of their kids’ birthdays? Would that kid get upset and feel left out? Are they on Facebook? Do they notice? Or is this just about the parents? Would they feel like a failure as a parent if they didn’t publicly announce a kid’s birthday? Last July I forced myself not to post about my daughter’s birthday on her birthday. Forced. Willed myself. Why did I have to? Where does that pull come from? My daughter didn’t give a fuck. She’s 8 years old. So I enjoyed the day with her and my sister and her kids and didn’t post anything. I let it pass. And you know what? It felt good. Like another liberation, another unshackling from social media chains. Instead, I posted some pictures on MY birthday as a sort of annual retrospective, while acknowledging birthday wishes from my friends and family. My daughter was in some of them. When she started school in September, I posted a picture of her with a single line description. Why did I even do that? I think maybe because it was COVID and she was starting school normally for the first time in two years and I wanted to celebrate that and her courage and strength. But it was like my third post in 4 months. And it makes me wonder: what is it that compels us to share these things, and where is the line? How much of it is genuine sharing with people we care about versus an ego-driven need for attention and gratification? Facebook doesn’t care. It makes a shitload of money exploiting both. Taking a step back has helped me see my social media self with clear eyes. It’s also made me look at my friends’ and relatives’ social media selves with clear eyes. Most social media posts are for self-gratification, not true connection. That’s my working theory. And maybe that’s fine for some people, maybe they need it, but personally, I’m trying to get away from that as much as possible. Less is more. Less is healthy.
4. Yeah, Big Guy, what about Twitter? People who know me know that my Twitter activity has not abated as it has with Facebook. Quite the contrary. I value Twitter because I get a lot of information quickly there, and interact with people from different walks of life who have perspectives on the world that I would never get anywhere else, including my personal social bubble. I don’t recall exactly when, but after getting pulled into one too many political arguments with complete Twitter strangers, I decided to mute all notifications from non-followers. I can’t engage with people whose comments I can’t see without going back to the post and looking for replies. It’s made a huge difference. If people really want to engage in good faith, they can follow me. Otherwise, replies from strangers typically lead to an even bigger time suck than Facebook and often, a ruined afternoon. It’s not worth it. Not seeing and engaging with replies (which are sometimes positive), means I get fewer followers, but that’s not why I’m on Twitter. I’m also more selective about Twitter debates now. Some of the people I follow disagree with me politically, but our interactions are usually positive and respectful. I try to keep them to a minimum now. Still, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that Twitter has its own form of addictive dopamine hits. It’s up to me to be self-aware and manage them. But it’s not as if I’m applying one standard to Facebook and another to Twitter. At the very least, I’ve limited myself to one social media site, instead of 3 or 4.

Maybe I’ll return to being more active on Facebook at some point. Maybe I’ll delete it entirely, which is my true desire at the moment. I’m not there yet. I’ve been on Facebook a long time, and it’s my primary connection to family in Italy and elsewhere. Maybe a better social media site will arrive, one that does a better job of mitigating human nature and puts society ahead of profits. Until then, I’m finding that a little self awareness goes a long way.