I do not usually join in on the New Year’s Day madness of declaring some kind of resolution of change that often goes by the wayside by the end of January.  However, this year I wound up doing so rather inadvertently.  A month previous, I deleted my Facebook profile, and the Zuck kindly gave me another 30 days to reconsider my choice before making the decision permanent and irrevocable.

I went about my holiday business and didn’t think about it too much, until about 3 weeks after I’d deleted my account.  Then the withdrawal symptoms set in and I began to wistfully think of things I wanted to post, as well of the funny memes I knew I was missing.  I held strong, though, knowing that Facebook was willfully designed to addict its users to their own dopamine just as surely as heroin does.  I stuck it out through the holidays.

Then on January 1, I got the final notification that my account was permanently deleted.  One part of me rejoiced, while another part was still sad at the loss of an avenue of what it perceived as connection.  I went about my life, making a mental note of the times when I felt compelled to share a quip or a photo and analyzing them for why I felt like sharing  them.  I asked myself if there was any real meaning behind the things I felt like sharing.

After a few weeks of this self-analysis, I realized that for the vast majority of the things I felt like sharing, the motivation was purely selfish.  I was after reactions and comments, thirsty for attention and validation, which is what the Zuck relies on to keep his website running.  There was no real meaning or substance behind the things I wanted to post, for the most part.  It was all superficial fluff.

I also analyzed my feelings regarding what I felt like I was missing by not having the feed to scroll through.  I quickly realized that I wasn’t really missing much of anything.  The algorithm had long ago destroyed my ability to actually see most of my friends’ posts, replacing them with ads and ‘suggested pages’.  It had gotten good at feeding me memes it knew contained themes I enjoyed, but despite liking the memes, I also felt manipulated into doing something I didn’t necessarily want to be doing.

Over time, I realized that my life wasn’t really missing anything at all.  Whatever needs social media had been filling turned out to be illusory appetites that were easily assuaged with much more fulfilling activities, like reading books, writing, and participating with actual human beings in real life at church.  I did miss hearing the news of my friends’ lives and the photos of cats, but there was much more that I did not miss.

It has now been more than six months since the permanent deletion of my Facebook account, and I have to say that I rarely think about it anymore.  Occasionally there will be a life event or a photo that I wish I could share with everyone, but if I really have to scratch that itch, I always have people’s email addresses.  I did not have Twitter/X or Instagram accounts to delete, so severing myself from social media was relatively easy.

I do still participate on Mastodon and Reddit, but only occasionally.  Interaction on Mastodon is sporadic at best, and Reddit is something I’ll use to fill time when I’m bored and don’t have anything better that I feel like doing.  I have to be careful with it, though.  Reddit is something of a broad portrait of the mostly-English-speaking world, which means that sometimes it’s wonderful, and sometimes it’s horrible.  Reddit makes me burst into laughter quite frequently, but sometimes it also makes me burst into tears.  In fact, Reddit recently made me suicidal when I made a post in a mental health sub and the people there misinterpreted my words, getting an erroneous impression of me and consequently levying a lot of judgment at me that wasn’t appropriate.  I’ve stayed off Reddit since then.

I have to say that I’m happier with my post-social media life than I have been in a long time.  I’m an old-school participant in early social media platforms such as Livejournal and MySpace, and I remember when the digital world actually fostered community and connection.  People posted content of substance and meaning that forged real friendships.  Facebook ruined all that.  They sucked all the oxygen out of the room and now that everyone is hooked on them, they’re doing everything they can to ruin what community is left, because community values are anti-capitalist.  And Facebook is nothing now but a huge engine in the capitalist machine.

Progressive people these days talk a lot about how we need a revolution, and they’re right.  It’s not going to look like past revolutions, though.  It won’t be fought with guns, it will be fought with choices.  And I feel strongly that ditching social media is a powerful choice that can be made that would severely undermine at least one of the world’s most dominating forces and send a strong message to the Powers That Be that people aren’t as docile as they think.

It might not seem like that big of a deal, but it is.  Facebook is now designed to give you as little personal interaction as possible, just enough to keep you coming back but not enough to satisfy while simultaneously exposing you to as much advertising and propaganda as possible.  You are nothing but a target for the greedy and the authoritarian.  Anything you think you’re actually getting from the site is an illusion that becomes obvious once you’re away from the site for longer than about a month, which is why they leave that 30-day window before permanent deletion: they know a subset of people will cave before that point and undelete their accounts, unable to tolerate the withdrawal symptoms of their dropping dopamine levels.

People get angry when they’re told they’re an unwitting victim of addiction.  Addiction is heavily stigmatized in this country.  To be an addict is considered to be weak and powerless, even immoral here.  It is often those most deeply in the throes of addiction that protest insinuations of being an addict the most strongly.  No one wants to feel they’re being told that they’re weak, powerless, or immoral.  This is one of the reasons people continue using Facebook despite knowing on one level that they’re being played.  On another level, they’re in denial that they’re being manipulated because it’s a fact that’s too hard to accept.

In the instance of social media, being an addict does not indicate weakness, powerlessness, or immorality.  What it indicates is being tricked and manipulated into using a system that, on the surface, appears to give a measure of happiness and joy by being connected to other people, but whose real purpose is to make money off you.  Hence the deliberate manipulation of your feed via the algorithms so that most of what you see is ads and suggestions that further feed the capitalist appetite.  It gives you just enough to keep you coming back, but is never truly satisfying.  If it weren’t so diabolical, it would almost be impressive.

If we are to take back control of our lives and our country, refusing to participate in systems that we know are designed to exert control over us will need to be part of that effort.  One of the last things I did before leaving Facebook was to utilize the messaging system to get all of my friends’ email addresses (which the messaging system did NOT make easy: Facebook doesn’t want you to leave).  Now I can contact people directly if I need to.

Remember back when we all wrote letters and emails to one another?  I found that a far more fulfilling manner of interacting with my friends and family than Facebook ever was.  A letter or an email is personal and intimate.  Facebook is gossiping around the so-called water cooler.  It’s largely superficial information without depth or breadth.  Yet in our increasingly busy world, for many people it constitutes the only opportunity for personal connection in our lives.

This is what the Powers-That-Be wanted.  Destroying connection and community is one of  the most powerful tools that oppressive forces put into play when they’re trying to dominate a population of people.  Cutting off connection and community also destroys something that is critical when people are being threatened: communication.  Now that most people do their connecting and communicating on Facebook or other platforms, their communications are now monitored and censored.  Witness the way Facebook continually allows fascists to freely and openly post on the website, yet brings out the ban hammer for progressives.

This is a deliberate effort on the part of capitalist and increasingly fascist forces to obfuscate the truth and destroy efforts of progressives to mobilize together to fight.  If we can’t communicate, we can’t collaborate.  If we can’t collaborate, we can’t mobilize.  If we can’t mobilize, we can’t fight.  If we can’t fight, we will be victims to this rising fascism forever.  And that’s what they want.

Facebook may outwardly seem relatively benign, if not annoying, but nothing could be further from the truth.  As the largest social media site on the planet at over 2 billion users, 25% of the population of the Earth, it wields an immense amount of power over those users, as well as what they talk about.  Facebook has become a manipulator of truth and a perverter of justice as it pushes anti-humanitarian views in the name of making more profit for the billionaire Powers-That-Be.

I feel strongly that one of the most powerful things individuals can do to take back some of  their power is to delete their Facebook, Instagram, and X/Twitter accounts.  Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk are two of the most dangerous individuals on the planet because of the financial power they wield, and it must be taken away from them.  They are financial dictators that need to be removed from power.

There are other ways for people to connect, communicate, and conduct business than on the primary social media platforms.  Substack has become a strong competitor to social media, and WordPress has been around for a long time, now powering about a third of the world’s websites.  Both of these sites allow for the same social connections one can get from other sites like Facebook, but are focused on longer posts with more content rather than the small bits of superficiality we’ve become accustomed to.  All of the functionality is the same, from liking to reposting: there’s just more substance.

We just have to overcome our inertia that has settled in after more than a decade of using Facebook.  We’ve gotten used to it, and humans are reluctant to change even if we know something is bad for us.  It takes time and energy that our stressful world increasingly does not allow us.  However, too many of us have developed the equivalent of diabetes from extensive use of Facebook, and we need to change our diets so that we can be healthy again.  It wasn’t our faults, but it has become our responsibility to take control of our lives so that we are no longer controlled by outside entities.

Sometimes I think I miss Facebook, but then I remember what a dissatisfying experience it always was.  How I would post important things and have no one ever see them because the algorithm had decided to hide it for whatever reason.  How it creeped me out the way it would show me ads for things I had only talked about in the vicinity of my phone.  Facebook had become an unwelcome intruder in my life, one that censored my online voice and made me feel increasingly worthless while still enticing me to scroll the feed.

I’m glad I took control of my life back and the Zuck no longer controls me.  I miss my friends occasionally, but if I really want to know how they’re doing, I can always write to them.  Sometimes I feel lonely, but I realized that I’ve only become aware of the exact same loneliness I was feeling while using Facebook, which only offers superficial connection.  It’s junk food for the heart and psyche while offering no real nutrition.

I think we’d all be a lot better off if we shunned this digital junk food in favor of real life connections again.  Write letters and emails to each other.  Find an in-person group of people with common interests, like arts and crafts or a reading club.  Learn to love yourself if you don’t already: it makes it easier to be your own best friend and eases loneliness.  Join a spiritual group or church that matches your own inclinations.  Call your loved ones on the phone, if that’s your thing.  If it’s not, text and chat with them.

There is a life beyond social media, and it doesn’t have to mean losing touch with the people you love.  It just takes a bit of effort to re-establish the personal foundation once again that Facebook took away and smashed so the Zuck could become a billionaire.  Believe me, life without social media isn’t nearly as hard as I thought it would be and has, in fact, opened up a lot of time and energy for me to do more fulfilling things.  I have confidence your experience will be the same should you follow the same path.