A retrospective marking my 1-year anniversary of deleting Facebook
I’m just approaching my 1-year anniversary of divorcing myself from the 24-hour outrage cycle and a brief retrospective is due. I initially deleted Facebook because I felt that, instead of helping maintain my relationships, it was actively harming them. I’ve never used Twitter (from the outside Twitter looks like all rage, all the time, mixed with an unhealthy dose of “Notice me Senpai”, and topped off with eternal permanence of anything one happens to drunkenly fingerblast at 4 am after a few too many Ambien. I’ve never been remotely tempted).
This was partly due to the fact that in an effort to speak Truth!, or build Awareness!, or whatever, I was putting up a bunch of (sometimes aggressively-) niche memes from my Grey Tribe echo chamber which were obviously irritating my family and friends when anyone engaged at all, and partly because I was getting reciprocally annoyed by the likes and shares from everyone else’s echo chambers. I was struck by a recent trip to visit friends and extended family, most of whom I hadn’t seen in a decade or two, and how… unlike their posts they all were. Facebook was skewing my sense of how reasonable and decent they are, in a strongly negative way.
I took the plunge and deleted my account. I knew I had to replace the behavior with something and not just try to go cold turkey with anything as stimulative as Facebook, so I resolved to actually pick up my phone and call distant friends and chat with them whenever I felt the urge to go scroll through outrage porn.
The first thing that struck me a week or two after the deletion was how I didn’t miss Facebook in the slightest. I was expecting to struggle, to feel like I was missing something, to be tempted to rebuild my account… Nope. Not for a second.
To be fair, there were a couple valuable things Facebook gave me that I knew I had to find other sources for: groups and baby pictures. Groups were easily replaced by Reddit (for the public hobby ones, like woodworking or disc golf), or by email threads or Band for the private ones like D&D group coordination. I’ve missed out on a few baby pictures, but my wife still makes sure I get to see the best ones, and I can email pictures I take directly to my grandma’s digital photo frame so she’s not missing out on her great grand-kids. Problems solved well enough.
I shook up my outrage exposure in other ways at the same time. I deleted most of my daily news sites, and the ones which I felt like I still needed to monitor for important events went into a folder marked “Sunday”, which I open once a week on (you guessed it) Sunday. The thing that surprised me most about this particular technique was the validation of some quote I can’t find the attribution on: “There’s no cure for reading the news like reading last week’s news”. Even just a few days’ distance reveals that 99% of what you find on a daily news site to be woefully incomplete, uninformed, useless, inflammatory, and… pointlessly outrageous.
These days, most Sundays I don’t even bother opening the folder.
Instead, I’ve replaced my unhealthy outrage porn fixation with more long-form and constructive thought. I highly recommend SlateStarCodex (come back soon, Scott!), Open Source Defense, Handwaving Freakoutery, and, of course, Epsilon Theory.
For faster non-outrage dopamine rushes, I recommend non-Culture War threads on Reddit as well as Hacker News.