five years offline
or, the quiet love of life without facebook; or, social media didn't ruin life but it made it easier for you to ruin your own
Fundamentally, I think there are two types of people living in the Age of Social Media:
Those who can use social media in a benign way
And the rest of us freaks
The idea that social media sites themselves are evil has become more and more prevalent1 but I’ve been finding myself shrinking from that idea more and more. I mean, they’re definitely not a pro-social aspect of society and I think the case that its goals are antisocial are almost impossible to deny, but I also think the psychic power we’ve collectively assigned to sites like facebook and twitter and instagram are, to put it mildly, overstated.
Even so, the damage they personally do to me has been unmistakable for probably almost a decade. And so around five years ago, I disengaged from facebook and twitter. I kept instagram because I didn’t really engage with it in the same way. I just posted a picture and thumbed out of the app. But I left facebook and then, I think, after the Trump election, I permanently deleted my account2.
It was probably one of the best decisions I’ve made in my many years of engaging with social media. I permanently deleted my twitter account some time later.
One thing that struck me about my final years on facebook was how assaulting it is. I would log out and stay away for months at a time. When I logged back in, I almost always immediately closed that browser window. The actual layout of the screen seems designed to overwhelm you with information. After months away, it was simply too much and I’d have to get out of there.
What surprised me most, though, was how natural this had been for me for years. I think I logged onto facebook for the first time in 2006 when I was eighteen. I logged out for the last time in, I think, 2016, when I was 29. Facebook had changed a lot in those ten years, and, obviously, I had changed a lot too. But the feature creep on facebook became so normal and natural to me that I wasn’t really able to see how much the infinite stream of content sort of burned into me. After a break, it became almost nauseating to look at, though.
And then, weirder yet, if I kept logging back in, kept staring at the screen and scrolling, it would slowly all snap back into place and become normal. Like, not slowly at all, actually, but shockingly fast. Not over the course of days or weeks, but minutes. It gave me a surreal trapped sensation, like I had been tricked and sucked into muck that I couldn’t get myself free of but that also never entirely pulled me under to suffocate me.
And so I left. I had to leave.
I don’t mean to be dramatic. I don’t think anything bad would have happened to me. I wouldn’t have become a skinhead or committed suicide or started asking my doctor (do people actually have their own doctors?) about ivermectin or whatever. But I would have continued to spend so much mental space in a townhall untethered from anything that makes communication pleasant.
Facebook is a diseased brain. That’s how I think of it. It doesn’t disease your brain (though it’s obviously not good for most of us, in that regard), but it just is a diseased brain. It’s a distorted logic machine thriving on displaced anger. Even the way it communicates information is so inhumanly designed. We’re not meant to process this much information every second. We’re not meant to be able to track the multiple lanes by which that information is conveyed to us3.
It is a profoundly ugly site. The way it conveys all this information is ugly. The way it constantly scrolls is ugly.
I’m not even speaking politically here. It’s just a nightmare to look at. But the weirdest thing about it is how compulsive we find this garish site. If we could take a person from the renaissance and rip them out of time and put them in front of a computer with facebook on the browser, they would obviously have a lot of questions. But I think if we told them to sit there and read for a while and showed them how to scroll and click, within an hour, they’d feel strangely at home there.
Which is maybe kind of alarming. We’re so adaptable and neurologically plastic that even an insane process normalizes pretty abruptly4.
I don’t think I’ve come to any profound insights about life after abandoning social media. If I have any, it’s that your internet friends who are your actual friends will remain your friends. The internet friends who just cluttered your life will largely disappear and you’ll never hear about them or think about them again, for better or worse. I mean, there are a few people who I wouldn’t know without facebook who I still talk to just about every week! But of the hundreds of facebook friends once numbered on my friend’s list, I only speak with maybe fifty of them5 regularly.
But I’ve also made new friends wholly off the internet since abandoning it.
What a novel thing! To come to know someone not through their posts but through their bodies, their faces and voices.
While I don’t think facebook is breaking humanity or democracy the way some pundits claim, I do think it’s designed to compel us to the nastiest kinds of digital behavior.
And I’ll say this about myself:
The times I used social media the most were the times in my life when I was least happy. The times I found myself endlessly scrolling or posting or reading posts were the times of my life where being alive felt absolutely devastating. The weight of existence, the trauma of reality threatened to break me, and it’s possible that, had certain moments tipped in a different direction, I may have done something permanently undoable to myself.
Facebook didn’t make me depressed or miserable or terrified of being alive, but it certainly didn’t help. It gave me an outlet to vent, sometimes publicly, the deterioration of my mental health over the course of hours, weeks, months.
It was through such disastrous experiences that I learnt to have sympathy and understanding for the trolls.
Happy people don’t argue with strangers on the internet.
Functional humans don’t feel hate and spite when they’re contradicted by friends, family, or strangers.
Normal people don’t judge themselves by counting the likes their posts get and they especially don’t judge themselves based on how many likes the person they’re arguing with gets on their posts.
Contentment does not come through content.
I don’t think I was ever a troll, probably mostly for aesthetic reasons, but I mean to say that I understand why some of the worst people on the internet do some of the worst things on the internet.
Misery is a powerful emotion and can lead to disastrous behaviors.
So it’s not that facebook makes us all bitter trolls, but that it makes a very large space for a collection of deeply unhappy and unwell people to engage in behavior that would lead to ostracization if it occurred in any other space in society.
Street preachers are not exactly respected members of the community, but social media seems designed to make this kind of behavior feel normal through sheer numbers and algorithmic swings.
Since I ran in mostly writerly circles on the internet, I remember the gradual way certain things on facebook began to change. After graduating college, most people I knew continued to use facebook the same way they did in college. But over the next few years, more and more of the people who were out there living, presumably, relatively normal lives, began posting less and less.
On the otherside of my life, the writers I was friends with or admired began posting more and more.
So facebook began to feel oddly flat. Most everyone I knew that posted regularly came from a similar background: college educated, probably with a degree in some liberal arts discipline, politically moderate to left but almost uniformly left of center (if only nominally and in the context of US politics, specifically), with aspiration for the arts or academia (usually both, honestly6).
Then something else started to happen while normal people stopped posting and a certain subset of weird freaks like me began posting all the time: politics7.
Politics has always been with us, of course, but usually there have been various impediments to communicating your every thought about every political moment to everyone you know instantly. But it became striking to me how many of these writerly types seemed to now truly just aspire to be a new pundit class that rested comfortably beneath the Rachel Maddows of the world, and mostly restating in a few sentences what Maddow spent an hour of cable TV talking about8.
This was also the Era of Memes. An era we’re still living in. But this is where people began to form their political identities based on memes thrown together by fourteen year olds on 4chan.
Facebook became sort of a perfect storm of the normies abandoning it, the freaks who judge their value within their clique based on likes and shares with the most engagement coming from posting righteously inoffensive or wildly aggressive controversial political thoughts, and the memefication of politics, where every hot take was boiled down to a sentence fragment slapped over one of ten different image templates that could be thrown together in less than a minute.
Of course, part of the appeal of this kind of memefication of discourse was because some of the memes were insanely good.
The more meme based politics became, the faster memed politics could spread and form us all into our own little clusters that would, years later, form into massive monoliths over every possible cultural issue with no room for nuance or overlap. To cross from one side to the other on any single cultural topic was to signal to your own in-group that you were a betrayer, or illustrate to your former enemies that you’re a paragon of open-mindedness.
And every time you shared, you got more likes, more shares. Every once and a while, someone you barely knew in middle school would hop into your comments to call you a libtard or fascist or something (depending on the aesthetics of your politics) and everyone you knew jumped in to defend you and…that felt good.
It felt so good, you did it again.
Not out of any social calculation (at least not yet) or because you thought you had some insight on Truth (it takes time for delusion), but because dozens of people came out to agree with you and maybe, just maybe, they needed you to be their voice, to give voice to the thoughts they all had but weren’t brave enough to say aloud (we are all so very brave online) or, rather, didn’t know they felt that way until they saw the meme that captured so perfectly their political anxiety, their fears of the future, their hopes and dreams reflected so purely in the meme that you maybe even crafted yourself (distilling a few headlines you read on one of those ten image templates).
Facebook didn’t make you communicate this way, but the system did reward you both in its internal ecosystem and by pumping your dumb brain with pleasing neurotransmitters. It’s not that facebook is evil or socially engineered us all to become the most insufferable types of people imaginable when we sit behind our keyboard, but it made it easy to do that and then rewarded you for being the worst version of yourself.
But that version is still you.
Facebook didn’t make you hate yourself.
Its algorithms just rewarded you for being a self worth hating. And the hate you felt from Others became lionization for your brand of memed politics. You costumed your language in social justice or the dangers of cultural marxism9 and spent hours in the glow of your laptop in dark, empty rooms surrounded by exactly zero friends arguing with people you barely knew and whose opinions you didn’t care about while anxiety gnawed at the ticker counter of likes on every comment.
And when the tides turned and you became a pariah even to those who once made you believe that you were a voice to the voiceless, you didn’t change your path: you dug in deeper, isolated further.
It’s comforting to say that facebook did that.
A multi-billion dollar advertising company destroyed my relationship with friends and family—that’s a comforting fiction. In this version of your life, you didn’t actually do any of that. Or, you did it, but it was a zombie version of yourself.
And this feeds into one of the other worst habits of the internet: everything is permanent.
Which means even if you do become a gentler, kinder person, someone will find the version of you exhibiting the worst possible behavior from years ago and demand that you—no matter how much you’ve apologized, no matter how much you’ve grown and changed—you are never better than the worst version of yourself.
You are forever guilty for the things you typed online during the worst, most disastrous hours of mental anguish. That hollowed out version of you begging for understanding, howling for significance—you are cursed to forever be that version of yourself to anyone who ever disliked you for any reason.
Even if you delete all those ill-advised comments and outbursts: someone saved it. They're saving it to one day rub your face in it again.
You are forever trapped in the moment when your mental health and relationships were at their absolute worst because someone who never liked you is just waiting to remind you and everyone you know that you were, for at least the thirty seconds it took to type that comment, the worst piece of shit on the internet.
Online, there is no forgiveness because all time is now. Something you typed ten years ago squinting through one eye while too drunk to even stand may as well be chiseled by hand into your tombstone10 by the person in life who hated you most.
You may have transformed your life from one of those deranged dudes who created fandoms devoted to tech-feudalists into someone who has made a career out of, like, housing activism in the most economically stratified and racially segregated cities in the US (looking at you, New York) or whatever. To a certain type of person who neither likes you nor cares about you, though, you will still be that guy who, in 2009, thought Peter Thiel and Elon Musk had some cool ideas, who thought Bill Gates became a philanthropist out of the goodness of his heart.
And so, to put it simply, the last five years have been pretty dang comfortable with regard to all this. I don’t see all the neurotic shit you maniacs post or the horrendous political takes from people I haven’t spoken to since I was twelve.
The only advice I have to anyone, honestly, when it comes to social media is maybe to do two things:
Log how much time per day you spend on social media.
If you’re using one site or app more than 90 minutes per day, delete that app or delete your account from that site.
I mean, think of all the things you could be doing with those 90 minutes per day11? Even if all you exchanged that time with was staring at the wall thinking about how weird it is that the Powerpuff Girls didn’t have fingers, you’d probably be quite a bit happier than you are right now.
But for you writerly idiots like me who may be reading this now: if you spend 90 minutes a day writing your novel that you keep telling yourself you’re going to finish, you’d be finished in a few weeks. If you spent those 90 minutes talking to your siblings or parents or children or spouse or partner, you’d definitely be happier and maybe the unhinged members of your family would find their hinge again.
I’m not saying I’m a good person or a better friend or son or brother or husband or father12, but I definitely don’t spend my time feeling existential dread because of something I read by someone I barely know.
To be honest, I don’t spend my time doing much of anything special or out of the ordinary. I read books. I watch terrible TV. I tell myself I’m finally going to take care of my yard. I write novels no one will read.
My life is pretty ordinary.
It’s kind of the best thing to ever happen to me, honestly.
So if you’re someone who honestly believes that Mike Zuckerberg or James Dorsey are actively driving the rise in hate crimes or whatever…why are you still logged in?
If you believe the science, why are you ignoring all the studies tracking the devolving mental health of rabid social media users?
If you’re not a junky for memes jonesing for another argument about how a Jeopardy contestant either made a white power gesture or simply counted to three, why don’t you just log out?
Don’t throw your phone in the ocean, but definitely delete these apps that you allegedly only use just to keep in contact with friends and family who live far away, because they are immortalizing you in ways you’d probably prefer to forget. They are cannibalizing time that you will never regain.
Even if you’re not embarrassed of things you said ten years ago13, wouldn’t life be better if you weren’t carrying that around with you everywhere?
Social media is just a tool. Or maybe a whole tool set. Either way, you can choose, right now, to stop using that hammer as a ruler.
I mean, they absolutely need to have their monopolies broken up for hundreds of reasons.
Possibly my timing is off by a few months—I don’t remember.
I don’t know what facebook looks like now, but I remember at least three or four distinct lanes of information. There was a sort of constant ticker at the top right, a highlighted area on the left telling me who was online that i might want to chat with, something kind of clickable at the very top center of the page, and then the main thoroughfare: the newsfeed.
I’ve told many people about my interesting time in Hungary, but I’m always reminded and struck by how the older generation missed the Soviet Union. Even the bad things. I could say more about this, could probably talk for the next week about it, but I think Svetlana Alexievich already wrote the best expression of this.
This includes people I knew independently of social media.
Maybe I’ll someday write about this combination of traits and what it meant for the burgeoning indie lit scene and why the inevitability of its current state was borne from this combination. But this is the kind of inside baseball that probably only appeals to disaffected former members of what was affectionately called the inde lit scene.
Sometimes I cringe remembering how I’d compulsively share every marxist or anarchist take that sprang to my head, or how I’d be ranting about Chelsea Manning of US imperialism to an audience of people so disinterested in my specific politics that I was probably quite unpleasant to follow.
This is probably most pronounced on twitter, which is a catastrophe for a different piece, if I ever feel like writing it or if people actually want to know what I think about the world’s most influential and least used social media site.
lol
To a certain type of person, Ted Cruz will always be the politician who liked a porn tweet on 9/11 and Kurt Eichenwald will always be the dude who accidentally revealed his curiosity about or appreciation for cartoon tentacle porn. These are the hilariously good versions of this, and the fact that they exist makes this behavior slightly intoxicating, addictive, and we seek to replicate that high.
Sleeping, for one.
Weird way for me to announce I have an almost-three year old.
You should be.
>See this post in my email
>Footnotes?!
>Thus begins Eddy's transformation into the next DFW
I, too, have mostly removed myself from social media, finding that it really has a negative impact on both how I see myself and how I see the world. Facebook, Twitter, Instagram... my life has improved dramatically since I have distanced myself from all of them.
What I find most amusing is that even though I'm a liberal, and mostly (though not entirely) caught in a liberal bubble on social media, I still find myself irritated, saddened, and frustrated by the rancor of my friends online. Some folks who are genuinely great people turn into real monsters on the internet, and they don't (in this case) even have the benefit of anonymity. I find that both fascinating and horrifying.
One interesting problem that came from this, though, is that I participate in a lot of hobby (mostly costuming and maker) groups. Now that online forums have gone the way of the dinosaur, there are few places outside of Facebook to share ideas, advice, and solicit help. This is a particular shame for two reasons:
1) It forces people to participate in a negative environment. Even heavily moderated groups still have you surrounded by other content that's shared by an algorithm that is quite problematic.
2) Facebook is a terrible format for this. Searching is almost nonexistent, and it's really hard to efficiently and effectively get or share help.
I have created a Facebook account that I only use for groups, and that helps with problem 1 to some extent, but I still really mourn the loss of dedicated forums on the internet.