Any Day Now

TL;DR: I spend too much time looking at social media and it's a problem that's not magically going to fix itself. 

Quite some time ago, I made a post on Facebook saying that I needed to delete my profile. Of course, I didn't say when I'd do it, just that it would be some time "soon." And of course, I still haven't done so. Every time I've thought "maybe today's the day," I give the newsfeed one last scroll and come across some news that I wouldn't have likely gotten in any other form. Concert announcements, new restaurants in town, and sometimes even news of what's been going on with friends I haven't heard from in years - all of it stuff I would probably be completely ignorant to if it weren't for the wonder that is social media. So I keep deciding to keep my social media accounts (which at this point is just Facebook and Reddit - I did manage to keep myself from going back to Instagram, despite all the amazing pictures I'm always taking). 

Originally I wanted to get rid of Facebook (and Instagram) because Mark Zuckerberg is a horrible human being and I felt like staying on the platform was, at least to some degree, supporting him. Honestly, I still feel that way, but it's felt like it's become one of those necessary evils in life. So at first I told myself if I was going to use the necessary evil, it would be as little as possible. I deleted the app from my phone and for a couple weeks, I honestly barely thought about Facebook, at least when I was away from my home computer. But then I realized I could just look at Facebook on my phone through the browser. Sure, it wasn't as intuitive and the site makes it clear you should just download the app for the full experience, but I felt that by staying away from the app, I was still staying true to my decision to use Facebook less. And I was soon once again devoting too much time to scrolling past ads so I could which of my friends was politically misinformed and which ones were on the "right" side of history. 

Which brought me to my second foolish compromise for using Facebook - if I was going to be on there, I was going to try and show how my political beliefs are the correct ones and those that disagree with me are being idiots. The problem with this is that I've yet to meet or even hear of anyone that changed their political stance due to some clever meme they came across on social media. While social media may be a great way for politically minded people to setup rallies and what-not, that's really the extent of its political use (unless you count the whole misinformation campaign used by foreign assets to mislead people, but that's a topic for another time). Beyond that, politically posting on Facebook seems to be nothing more than virtue signaling and just another way of disappointing your parents.

It all kind of sucks because it seems like social media should be a really good thing. Facebook, at its core, is a great platform for keeping in touch with friends and family. Reddit can be a great resource for information from like minded people of nearly any subject out there. And I'm sure the other social media platforms have (or at least had) their great uses too. But by and large it's all turned to shit and for some reason, I keep finding myself looking at the piles as though they'll magically turn back into the food from which they came. 

I know people that have social media accounts they barely look at and I'm honestly a bit envious. Like I've been doing a lot of thinking lately and one of the big topics I keep coming back to is that of time. I keep wondering where all my time is going and while I can't say it's all social media, I can say that takes up a good portion more than I realized. It's not uncommon for me to sit down meaning to just check Facebook or Reddit quick and then before I know it, I've spent twenty minutes reading inane posts with no relevance to my life. Fifteen to twenty minutes of time six or seven times a day adds up to a lot of time staring at a screen. Heck, even if those breaks were only ten minutes at a time, I'm still losing an hour-plus a day doing about as little as a human can do and still be considered awake. (Thank God I never got into the whole TikTok thing). 

Anyways, the point of this diatribe is that I really need to delete my social media accounts. In a perfect world, I'd develop the willpower to ignore them unless needed. But we all know self-control hasn't been my strong suit for quite awhile. As to when I'll actually be deleting the accounts, any day now. But at the latest, the end of the year.