Social media is an addictive drug, so I’m kicking my Facebook habit

By David McElroy · December 31, 2020

After 12 or 13 years as a heavy Facebook user, today is my last day posting on my account there. At least for now. I have mixed feelings about this.

Facebook is addictive by design. A lot of very smart people work hard to design the platform in such a way that users spend more and more time there. The more time a user spends on the platform, the more money Facebook makes.

Companies design their products in ways that suit their own needs, so I don’t blame Facebook. The people there aren’t evil. They simply have incentives to get me to do things which I have decided aren’t healthy for me.

Social media has been a good thing for me in some respects. It’s allowed me to connect or reconnect with people who wouldn’t have been in my life otherwise. I’ve made friends because of Facebook. The platform enabled me to reconnect with a woman who I then fell in love with as a result. And it’s maintained ties with people I might have lost touch with otherwise.

But those positives come at too great a cost. I believe it’s dangerous for all of us, but I’m especially convinced that it’s unhealthy for me.

I’ve written in the past about my concerns about social media, both for society as a whole and for me in particular. I’ve written quite a bit of other things about social media in addition to those links, but they’re probably good summaries. I don’t want to repeat too much of what I’ve told you before.

For someone such as me — who was raised by a narcissist and still has the emotional scars — social media is doubly dangerous because it allows me to put myself before others with the unspoken questions, “Do you like me? Do you love me?“ It’s an unconscious way to try to gain approval. And it’s not healthy for me.

I have to get away from social media because it gives me tiny jolts of emotional reward — which are ultimately useless — and it channels my energy away from doing work that could be more important in the long run.

It’s the equivalent of eating junk food and then not feeling hungry when it’s time to eat better food.

On social media, we’re performing — especially those of us who feel driven to create anyway — and we have so little control of our audience that we can lose it at any time. The social media platform controls who sees our posts and the platform rewards us for being shallow in ways that create quick engagement of approval. The platform penalizes us for attempting things which aren’t easily understood — and it especially penalizes us for not being popular.

Not only that, but those of us who need to create can’t grow an audience except with shallow and weak ties. If you want to play the game that social media is designed to amplify — because it suits the companies’ financial needs — you can grow an audience. But you can do that only by preaching to a choir. Posts which require more thought — and which invite respectful dialogue with those those who don’t already agree with you — are going to be hidden by an algorithm which cares only about promoting what’s popular and gaining engagement.

Social media will never be a platform to allow me to grow an audience for what I need to create. If I wanted to simply create an echo chamber for people who agree with me — and who like funny and angry posts supporting what we already think — social media is really good for that. It’s not very good for building the sort of audience I need for the work which I need to do.

I have a small group of people who tell me they love what I do, but there aren’t enough of them and I don’t know how to use this medium to grow an audience. I don’t think it’s possible. So I’m taking a chance that I’m talented enough to find an entirely different way to reach a bigger audience — by freeing up more time and taking away the hits of approval that I get now.

Will this work? I don’t know.

I’m giving up something in the short term which I enjoy at times, but I’m hoping it will force me to use my time in different ways. I’m hoping that I’ll be forced to create more work that will have a possibility of attracting a bigger audience, one which can allow me to make a living — instead of just providing free content for a social media platform to turn into its own profit.

For now, I don’t anticipate changing this for the future, but I can’t rule out that possibility. I will maintain the Facebook page for this website — please like and follow — and my articles will still be linked there, but I won’t be posting on my personal account. (I have to let the personal account stay technically active in order to maintain the page for this site.)

For anyone who needs to get in touch with me, my contact information will remain public, as it always has been. My email address is always on this page — and both my email and phone number are prominently displayed on the Facebook page.

It’s time for some more change for me. I hope I have some interesting results to share with you before long.

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Here’s the latest of my ridiculous parody shorts. It crossed my mind Tuesday to wonder what a slick and fast-talking car dealer might do right now to try to turn the high price of gasoline to his advantage. So I conceived of a fat and lovable character who tried to sell cars that don’t use any fuel — and then I started wondering if it would be funnier if all the characters were felines. Designing the King Cashpaw character took about four hours, but the rest took only another four hours, so this was a relatively quick piece that virtually wrote itself. I know it’s almost impossible for these parody videos to find a larger audience, but at least they amuse me — and there are 19 of them on my YouTube page now. The first few were very limited, but they’re getting more complex.

The Republican Party is dead. It still exists in name, of course, but it’s nothing but a shell. All that’s left are idiots and stooges and con men of the MAGA party. When Donald Trump is gone — which won’t be long — those populist idiots and pragmatic fools will have no one to follow. Democrats will thrive. They will take more power than ever and they will push the federal government further to the radical far left than ever. When that happens, don’t just blame Trump if you’re a conservative. Blame every person who has claimed to be a conservative and has given up on principles, character and everything else that Republicans once claimed to stand for. As someone who worked as a GOP political consultant for many years, this is disgusting and disturbing to me. Those who have enabled Trump to have almost unchecked power are going to be shocked when they see what they will unleash in the long run. It’s been plain all along what this narcissistic con man is. It’s your fault that you chose to pretend not to see what he really is.

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.

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