Let’s start out with the positive. I am grateful for what Facebook has given me. I’ve had my account for almost twenty years now, and during the first half of that time I needed all the help I could get building a social network. It helped me participate in, and even organise, events that turned acquaintances and friends of friends into real, close friends of my own. The small communities I found for trans people from all over the world were an invaluable support in my journey of self-discovery and acceptance. So I can’t find it in me to regret spending time there.
But times have changed, and so have my needs. I have found my own mycelium of weirdo friends now, and I’m even privileged enough to have more wonderful contacts than I am able to actively maintain. For a while, I saw Facebook as the solution to this luxurious problem, thinking that if I maintain light-weight contact with as many as I can and invite everyone who’s ever smiled at me to my parties, nobody will be mad at me or disappointed, right?
Over recent years, it has slowly occured to me that fear of abandonment is not a healthy basis to build a social life on. I’ve also had to face the reality that most social interactions (even the rewarding ones) are draining to me. I need far more rest and alone-time than I’ve been willing to admit (especially to myself). For a long time, I was pushing myself so hard to be a social butterfly, for fear of reverting to the awkward, shy kid that all the other kids avoided like the plague. To be fair, I gained many wonderful friends and a lot of self-confidence in the process, but it came with the cost of stress levels going permanently through the roof. Which led to anxiety, which led to burnout, and so on.
It’s a sour apple to bite in (as we say in Sweden), but I have finally started to accept that I need to live a smaller life. A boring life, a lonely life, a failure of a life, the fear still whispers in my ear at times. But I think the fear has got it all backwards. I’m finding that the less I do, the more depth and value I find in the things I actually spend time on. As if the space around them is necessary to help me appreciate them, or sometimes to even process them at all. That’s kind of the opposite of boredom: not to be constantly over-stimulated has me enjoying everything more. Even something so mundane as just existing.
I’ve also found that the fewer relationships I try to uphold, the less alone I feel. From the depths of burnout I realised that with severely limited capacity, quality matters so much more than quantity. And I think that’s how I want to keep valuing my friendships. There will never be time and energy enough for everybody I would want to have close.
There just isn’t room for the 1028 friends I have on Facebook in my mind, no matter how wonderful, creative, like-minded, intelligent, inspiring or provocative they are. To be honest, if I scroll through the list of contacts I can hardly even remember the context in which I met most of them. A course, a larp, a festival, a party, a random train ride, who knows?
It’s been years since I was actually active on Facebook, and whenever I log in nowadays I feel like a hundred years old. I can’t figure out the new features, and when I intend to check the details of an event or to consult a group for a specific interest, I find myself swept along by a current of vaguely relevant memes, videos and commercials—mostly posted by strangers I’ve never even heard of. And as if that wasn’t enough to make me feel sick, most of the art and even walls of text are now looking creepily similar to one another. I suppose AI is the common ground of this inbred creativity?
There are islands of genuinely wholesome content in there somewhere, I’m sure. This isn’t a personal attack on every Facebook user ever. And sometimes I am genuinely curious about what some of my friends are up to. But I just can’t handle the format of the endless feed. Because even though revulsion rises in me with each passing reel, I find myself glued to it for long stretches of time. Always emerging as if from a trance, with head spinning and heart racing, all traces of peace and focus thoroughly obliterated. Yet with an absurd craving to log in again.
It’s more than mildly disconcerting that a tool can have this power over me. I spend hours on meditation and yoga every week, and still I am apparently vulnerable to this attention-trap sucking all energy and direction out of me. I just can’t handle it, and it’s time to admit that. My feeble willpower can’t hold a candle to the multi-billion dollar industry that is social media.
The potential gains have kept me around for a good while longer than I think has been worth it. Keeping in touch with faraway friends, staying informed about events, expanding my professional network, having a platform to promote myself as an artist or getting to consult with like-minded strangers around the world just aren’t worth sacrificing my time and attention for. I have so very precious little of it, and I want to focus it on what matters most to me. Time to let go!
This isn’t goodbye forever. If you’ll actually miss me, I am sure you can find another way to contact me. My name is unique, and I do still answer texts, or even better, snail-mail. And if you want more of a low-key contact, you can always follow this blog.
On that note: so long, and thanks for all the fish! Hope to see you in the real world some day.
Love and peace of mind,
Tim
