Game Over

The cat is not out of the bag (yet)

So I deleted Facebook. Dramatically made an announcement, downloaded my data, and then canned it barely under a week. I’ve been looking for a reason for several years now, and swore that when my grandmother passed away I would throw in the towel. Five months later it was the removal of fact checkers, waking up to find that I had friended most of the new American presidential administration overnight, and the constant force-feed of AI slop that would push me over the edge quickly. So I did it, l pulled the plug on a LONG anticipated situation that I have hated more than loved for 17 years.

And I feel great!

My last FB post was my contact info on various platforms before deleting (especially this blog). Did anyone contact me? God, no. Who knows if most of my friends even saw it, as everyone (me included) is trained and conditioned to just doom scroll until you can’t bear it anymore . We are connected all over the world, yet more alone than we have ever been in our lives.

Facebook seems even more useless than it was before. Maybe we see the odd friend post here and there but mostly groups and topics we aren’t following. It’s all just a never-ending chain of bots upon bots, creating an endless cacophony of complete and totally useless bullshit.

Maybe it doesn’t bother everyone, but it sure bothered me, and I had to unplug myself.

Most of my FB friends were on Instagram, and I was talked into keeping that platform (for now) so people weren’t “losing” me, so much as I was just only going to be on less platforms. Really, it doesn’t fuckin matter. I am firmly of the mindset of that if you want to talk to me, you know where to find me. Nothing but high key respect for that frame of mind, so that’s who I am from this point forward.

For whatever reason I have always had decent boundaries with Instagram. Even though it’s just another zuck moneymaker, my feed is really only cat videos, animal videos, the sports teams I like, friends, and all sorts of meme pages. I check it out, send weird memes to siblings, and then I can leave it alone for hours. As a late Gen X (practically Xennial) my love for the meme is strong so I do want to keep memes handy. I won’t TikTok, I won’t snapchat. So until I’m ready to get fully off the grid, I’ll keep this open.

I wonder why I never developed the downward spiral with doom scrolling with this app in particular. It’s probably the “science ” behind pictures being the focus part and how it’s pretty easy to avoid comment sections. Or maybe it’s personal? Maybe because my mom and I share alpaca videos all the time and this is important to me. My grandmother and I shared cat videos with each other and it became something I cherished before she passed away. I am grateful for these small moments some parts of social media DOES create. It just seems like such a minute contribution, in the world of the AI bot takeover.

As I get ready to buckle down in Canada and ride out whatever the actual fuck my former homeland throws at the world, I’d like to have some avenues of peace to wander down while decompressing. Some roads less traveled where I can’t think about work or the fall of Rome. Anything but the doom scroll. Facebook has been leaving me with an uneasy feeling for years, so it was time.

So now it’s time to write more. Work out more. Read more more books, and just text people instead of liking their pictures as a replacement for communication. One morning when I was chugging my coffee before getting ready for work, I tried to mentally work through a morning that didn’t involve my phone. I couldn’t even process it at first. I actually couldn’t remember immediately so I started panicking (for some reason) that my just-waking-up-brain couldn’t FATHOM a morning without a phone scroll. This startled me into sitting at the edge of my chair, desperately trying to recall how in the fuck I would start my day.

It was eleven years ago, guys. That’s when I first had a smart phone. That’s IT. Late 2014 and I was quite late to the party, as I think they started becoming more widespread in the late “oughts”? 2009+?

It’s equal parts scary, full parts ridiculous. What the hell are we doing? The reality that I had so much time put into Facebook alone is wild, and is literally the definition of sunk cost fallacy since I hated being a part of it for SO long.

It’s sobering, it’s scary, and it’s the reality of millions of people. We need to rise up and start living our lives again and enjoying things in the moment. Not distracting ourselves with absolutely banal shit, as the world is shifting into hostile, weird, political divides.

We don’t need these apps. They need us.