2020-09-19
I'm 31, but the age and journey I'd like to discuss today has more to do with my cyberage. I've been an avid user of social media platforms for a long time. I scroll, post, and engage with a lot of content far more than I'd like to today. With this post, it's time to be held accountable to a harsh truth: in spite of social media having done and having provided a lot of good in my life to date, it has never at any point been good in or for my life.
I started using Facebook in 2006, Reddit in 2010, LinkedIn in 2011, Instagram in 2012, Twitter in 2013, and Snapchat in 2014. Both implicitly and explicitly, these platforms have influenced pretty much every single area of my life since. I still have no idea what it's like to be an adult who doesn't use these platforms. Does that make this post some kind of experiment or rite of passage? Maybe not... but this technological trap is definitely something I'm trying to be mindful of moving into the future.
As a 16 year old, Facebook seemed like "the next level" of what I'd come to expect from the likes of community forums and instant messaging platforms that I'd been using for roughly eight years prior. It was a means of fitting in, belonging, and connecting with the new Internet-connected world. At that age, I had some semblance of understanding that social media platforms fed on my insecurities and eagerness not to be left behind or left out, but what could I do to stop it?
At that point, not a heck of a lot. Each platform I encountered was a new tool, a unique resource, and a whole new world. This is how I'd romanticize the delusion that there was some underlying point to the dopamine hits. In certain cases, there might have been one... but in most, I was only fooling myself. They were tremendous time-wasters, remarkably addictive, and quite influential emotionally at my highest of highs and lowest of lows. Having spent nearly half of my life on Facebook and solid chunks of it on these other platforms, it's just about time to say goodbye for good.
I deleted my accounts and apps for Reddit, Instagram, Twitter, and Snapchat last night. Soon to follow will be LinkedIn, Facebook, and anything else that needs to go. I realize the richness of the irony of posting this to the remaining platforms I'm on, but those I love and do wish to stay connected with need to somehow find out why my social presence has disappeared all of a sudden. Take this paragraph as an eviction notice though such that my social media accounts and presence have to pack their things and be out by the end of the year at the very latest.
This has been an ongoing back-and-forth inner dialogue for a long time now. It was only finalized by tuning into The Social Dilemma last night. At the risk of sounding a little self-righteous, much of what the movie had to share and dramatize I was already at least partly aware of cognitively.
I've built my career and living doing things with technology (including social media) that elicit and encourage the rapid and borderline magical exchange of information and currency. As such, very few of these concepts and alarming truths from the film were foreign to me. That said, putting the algorithms, psychological manipulation, and research together was the final nail in the coffin for me.
I spent the majority of the film with an overwhelming swell of painful memories flashing before my eyes. I cried a few times. The bad and the ugly times along the way in aggregate were an astounding moment of epiphany for me.
I'm giving it some time to figure out the exit process from social media as we know it for good. That's what prompted the creation of this very plain and very simple website, to be honest. In spite of how bittersweet the goodbye may feel right now, I know this is for the best. This is true both for whom I'm striving to become and what I'm hoping to do in my precious and limited time on this Earth.