Taking a break from Facebook is a step to retake control over my life

By David McElroy · February 10, 2019

For many reasons, I’m leaving Facebook — at least temporarily.

I don’t like drama queens on Facebook who make a big deal of deleting their accounts, but I also don’t want to just disappear without explanation.

I’d like to just delete my account entirely, but I fear I might regret that at some point, so I’m taking a small step toward that eventual goal. At some point, I’ll re-evaluate things and decide whether to move on to de-activating or even deleting the entire account. For now, though, I’ve deleted both Facebook and Facebook Messenger from my iPhone and closed the browser tab in Safari on my MacBook.

I’ve mentioned this before, but I joined Facebook only because an ex-girlfriend wanted me to about 10 or 12 years ago. I didn’t really see the point of it. I eventually understood the point, but I don’t like the effect my use of Facebook is having on me.

Facebook has proven itself time and time again to be a company that doesn’t care about the privacy of its users. Listening to company reactions every time it’s caught doing something illegal or unethical makes it clear that its decision-makers simply don’t have the same values that I do.

Even if the company didn’t regularly prove how little it cares about its users, I don’t like the psychological effects Facebook has had on me. Many of those effects are the same with any form of social media, and I have strong reservations about every one of them. I’m just not ready to go so far as to ditch them all.

I use Twitter so sparingly that I’m not giving that one up yet. I do think Twitter is a toxic environment for a lot of people, but I follow fewer than 300 people there and aggressively block anybody who seems toxic. So for now, I might still appear on Twitter. But let’s be honest. How often does anything I have to talk about fit into a tweet?

For now, I’ll still be using Instagram, too, even though it’s owned by Facebook and has been making changes lately that I’m not happy about. Fortunately, the way I use Instagram — posting pictures of cats and dogs on one account and mostly nature on another account — doesn’t lend itself to the sort of toxic interactions which I want to get away from.

I tried to change my use of Facebook in ways that might have made it less toxic and I did make quite a bit of progress. I slashed my list of “friends” from 5,000 (the limit) to the current 692. As it stands now, I have more “followers” than actual connections, but this change still hasn’t been enough.

It’s hard to say whether my problems with Facebook are inherent to the service or they’re just flaws in me. I just know that I’ve ended up spending far too much time and energy on something which has a remarkably small positive return for me.

In a lot of ways, I suspect we were all better off before we knew the constant random thoughts of other people. In the past, we could have assumed most other people were like us — at least deep down — in their reasoning, their values and their temperament. For me, Facebook has made it impossible to maintain that fiction.

Seeing the raw and unfiltered thoughts of so many people — and coming face to face with evidence of such strong dysfunction in humanity — has been too much for me. When I stick with my own life and the lives of the people I know, that’s a scale I can emotionally deal with. When I’m hit with the tidal wave of what appears insanity in the public, it’s overwhelming.

For me, that creates an existential crisis. When I see the unfiltered nonsense which I see, it makes me feel despair that nothing can change — and that leads to inaction on my part. I want to narrow my focus to the things I can change.

There are some people with whom I never interact except on Facebook and I’ll miss some of those folks. But everything in life is a tradeoff — and the tradeoff I’m making now isn’t worth the effects it has on me. And it’s not as though nobody can get in touch with me. My real-world contact information is easy to find for anyone who’s interested.

I’m not under the delusion that “you’re going to miss me when I’m gone.” I’m not mad at anybody and I don’t feel unappreciated or any of the things the drama queens cite when they leave. I just need to retake some control over my life that I’ve given to social media — and this is a first step.

For now, I’m not deactivating the account. I’m changing my profile picture to make it clear what I’m doing and I’m posting a link to this article. One of the reasons I’m not immediately deactivating is that doing so caused some people to think I’d unfriended them when I did it for a couple of months about four years ago.

Media have played a huge role in my life in the past. I still love traditional print media, but they’re dying. I have almost no interest in consuming any form of broadcast media anymore, although I don’t rule out producing some form of media — mostly online — in the future.

I believe social media are destructive for our culture, but they’re just one element of a toxic brew that is making modern culture so ugly — and getting worse. More importantly for myself, I need my time and attention for other things which can help change my own life.

My articles here will continue to automatically publish to Facebook, but I won’t be posting anything else — and I won’t be reading anything that’s posted there.

If you need to get in touch with me, email to davidmcelroy@mac.com is the easiest way. And if you actually know me, you can always do something really old fashioned and pick up the phone to call.

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We are ruled by the dumbest and most incompetent people among us — and we have a system which allows stupid and irresponsible people to force the costs of their idiocy onto smarter and wiser people. Can we get away with that? Yes, for quite some time. But we eventually reach a point at which the dumbest of the dumb — who are habitual liars and mentally ill fools — lead us to the disasters and destruction that some of us have seen coming for years. We are approaching that point. And yet most of the idiots around us still wave their rhetorical banners of support for the evil people who are leading us to ruin — and all of them point their fingers at someone else, never noticing that their own enthusiastic support of evil is to blame. When things finally fall apart, blame yourself for your blindness to the evil, not whoever happens to be in power when it happens.

I’ve been making some changes to the site lately and there are more changes coming in the days ahead, so don’t be surprised if you some small differences. This is not a wholesale redesign, but rather the addition of some features. Since they’re smarter than I am, I’ve put Oliver and Alex in charge of the technical work, which you can see in this action photo from the control room of our media complex. I recently added a series of landing pages for readers who randomly discover the site from an Internet search. I’ve also changed the YouTube link at the top of the page to go to the new YouTube channel for video essays that reflect things I’ve already published here. (Here’s a little bit about both of the YouTube channels I’m working on.) In addition, I’m trying to move away from using Instagram, so I’m experimenting with photo plug-ins that will eventually allow me to host the pictures — cats, dogs, sunsets, whatever — that I often take. So don’t be surprised to see more changes. Thanks for your patience. Let’s hope Alex and Oliver know what they’re doing.

I have no use for the theocratic and repressive government of Iran. The people who run the country are cruel at best and evil at worst. The Iranian people deserve freedom. But I have no personal quarrel with anybody in Iran. While I’m not thrilled about a future Iranian government having nuclear weapons, I’m just as concerned about nukes in the hands of politicians in Israel, Pakistan, India, China and Russia. I’m not even thrilled with the U.S., Britain and France having them, either, because I don’t trust any politicians to be responsible with such terrible weapons. All I can say with certainty is that American taxpayers have no business attacking Iran, especially since we’re being forced to pay for this attack in order to benefit the politicians of Israel — and nobody else. If Middle Eastern countries want to fight among themselves, that’s none of my business. It’s not the business of the U.S. government, either. I have no quarrel with anybody in Iran — and having the government which claims to represent me launch an unprovoked attack against a sovereign country will only make all Americans less safe in the near future. This attack is poorly conceived and morally unjustified. Remember that when the Iranians launch attacks that we will then condemn as “terrorism.” What the U.S. is doing right now looks like terrorism to me. And let’s not forget that the attack is the latest in a long line of unconstitutional wars by various U.S. presidents — who have no legal power to declare war on their own, according to the U.S. Constitution.

A child having a tantrum understands only one thing: Did I get my way or not? He doesn’t understand the issues involved. He doesn’t understand the reasons that went into a decision. He doesn’t understand any of the things that mature and reasonable adults have to understand in order to live healthy lives. By his reaction to the U.S. Supreme Court’s ruling to strike down his disastrous tariff scheme, Donald Trump shows himself to be — once more — a screaming child having a tantrum. Outside the world of mob bosses who expect to get their way every time, normal adults don’t act this way, but Trump isn’t normal. He’s an angry and vengeful man who has narcissistic personality disorder. And we are in danger as a result. Trump doesn’t understand the legal issues involved in this ruling. He doesn’t understand economics. He doesn’t understand rule of law. He doesn’t understand that he can ever be wrong. All he understands is that he didn’t get his way. And he is now a narcissistic and raging little boy who also happens to hold life-and-death power over most humans on this planet. He’s dangerous — and the system which gives him that power is even more dangerous.

Is it an attempt to blur the gender line between men and women? Or is it some weird tribute to the traditional Scottish kilt? It’s hard to say, but fashion designers keep pushing for men to wear skirts in the last few years. Both men and women in modern fashion seem oddly androgynous, as though it would be offensive for a man to look manly or for a woman to look feminine. A CNN article about the latest fashions from Paris caught my attention Monday and left me wondering about the ugly clothes the designers are hawking. If a man wants to wear a skirt — or a kilt — that’s OK with me, but I’ll stick with a traditional dark suit with a white shirt and tie. (Well, when I’m not wearing t-shirts and sweats, of course.) I always wonder who actually buys the outlandish garb from fashion designers anyway. I would be humiliated to be seen in any of this stuff, but I obviously have no sense of high fashion.

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