Goodbye, Pretty Hate Machine

It’s time to part ways with Facebook. 

As I prepare to delete my account, a few reflections.

The TLDR; the costs outweigh the benefits. It’s takes too much attention capital, it is emotionally draining, and has removed most of us from a civic relationship to our community and country.

Why now?

Since I don’t login that often, all I get fed are pictures of past memories when I do login. This is nice, I guess, but I don’t need FB for this. The memories that matter are in my head and captured in journals. And all my photos are on Apple Photos, which provides curated memories If I want them. 

I prefer focusing on making new memories, not reliving and rewriting old memories. I could go into a nerdy tangent here about the experiencing self versus the remembering self, but you can read Daniel Kahneman’s “Thinking, Fast and Slow” on you own. 

Besides memories, I’m fed emotion-driven posts, luring me to engage and meet that emotion. 

Sure, if I scroll long enough, there are posts with meaningful updates from family and friends, but the trick is … I have to scroll for a long time. I have to stay transfixed to the site. 

The site has lost its value and utility; it takes more than it gives.

The site mostly delivers disappointment. 

Sure, I could use it differently. I could put a lot of effort into adjusting the settings and unfriending and all sorts of things to get the FB that doesn’t disappoint me … but what’s the point of that? 

All I’m doing is letting the machine give me a highly varnished and severely segmented version of something (not reality).

Also, January 6, 2021, was an excruciating day. The events at the Capitol a year ago today truly shocked my conscience. 

I, like many, reacted in real-time to the events, spilling my anger and frustration out on the platform. 

It’s how I felt at the time, but was it helpful?

For a fleeting moment I felt better. 

But at the end of the day all it did was fuel a machine that thrives on high-octane emotion. 

Obviously, prior to Jan 6, the social and political fabric of the U.S. was becoming threadbare. 

Facebook is the pretty hate machine. 

There’s good on the surface, but underneath, it’s vile and brings out the worst in all of us. 

It’s destroying us.

It’s removing us from us.

It has taken too many out of a true civic relationship with our community and country. Instead of participating in non-partisan civic organizations in the community, we join very partisan groups on Facebook. Then, when we do chose to participate in the civic functions, we bring a jaded and disconnected reality to the community we actually live in.

It makes us feel safe despite ourselves. It does this through hyper-networking and forging high-intensity connections. 

You can read “Connected: How Your Friends’ Friends’ Friends Affect Everything You Feel, Think, and Do” by Nicholas Christakis and James Fowler to fully understand what’s happening. 

We end up in these distorted echo-chambers. We don’t know they are distorted. They seem right to us because they reinforce who we think we are. 

But what I’ve observed is that most don’t know who they are. And Facebook is not the place to find yourself. 
Nor will be the metaverse or any other digital reimagining of a real, human experience. 

Watching people you love and respect show up in ways that are counter to who you thought they were is jarring and disappointing. 

This goes beyond simple disagreements about policy, ideas, or life. There’s a severe incongruence of fundamental values, principles, and social decorum. 

What I see on FB is not a world that resonates with who I am and who I am trying to be. 

Because FB is not mandatory for life, I am actively choosing to eliminate that disappointment and the negative emotions that go with it. 

As the Stoics remind us, our daily work is to navigate what we can control and what we cannot. 

I can control what digital spaces I belong to and bring into my life. 

And through that control, directly influence my emotional and physical health for the better. 

If I am better, I am inherently better for others around me. 

I choose that path. 

It’s worth noting that Facebook provided value to me once upon a time. 

When I joined FB in 2006, my life was inundated with new and critical choices. 

I joined FB because I was just coming out of jail and starting life over in South Dakota. It was a convenient way to get connected to family, see some things I couldn’t experience in person, and reconnect with others who were willing to be part of my life again. 

For quite a while, my day-to-day was about hyper-awareness and choice. In order to overcome a severe addiction, deep anxiety, and long untreated depression, I had to get critically aware of my surroundings, thoughts, emotions, and actions. Everything got evaluated in terms of their positive or negative influence in my life and goals. Once assessed, only then could I make certain choices. 

When you’ve lived most your life in chaos and most your decisions were based on heightened fear and extreme pleasure … slowing down to hyper awareness is incredibly hard.

To move through this period of time, I chose to view everything through a lens of toxicity. 

Obviously, alcohol and other drugs were out. These are toxins, after all. They provide very little nutritional value. And they were too closely associated with the near destruction of my life. 

I’m thankful to the few psychologists, therapists and mentors who taught me this approach. It saved my life. 

Soon, it became the way of assessing everything and everyone. 

Things are easier to accept and reject. 

People, not so much. 

But just like alcohol and drugs, people can be equally or more toxic. 

If your life is on the line, if you’re in survival mode, you choose who and what comes into it. 

When living in addiction, you choose drugs, alcohol, or other behaviors because they sustain a life. It’s a miserable life, but the alternative is either death or a life without those things — both are too uncertain; both are feared.

But if we want to first survive then thrive, we have to remove or reduce the toxicity in our lives.

Selfish? 

No. 

It’s the most compassionate approach to living I’ve ever come to know. Compassionate to me and to those around me. 

The last two years have been hard on so many of us. 

I think we’ve entered a generational cycle of hard choices. People are looking deeply at their lives and seeking new ways to live so they can thrive. 

The movement of people leaving jobs for better pay and treatment as employees is overdue. It’s necessary. It’s also happening because too many companies still believe in the credo: “Greed is good.” Despite the global corporate declaration favoring stakeholder over shareholder primacy. That movement isn’t moving fast enough. The people are kicking it along. 

If this shifting economic state is one tectonic plate, the tension is building from the other moving plate: our democratic republic. 

Earthquakes are quick and violent. As they settle, there are aftershocks. 

I have no idea where we are in this analogy. Maybe we’re in the middle of the earthquake? Everything is still shaking. Buildings (i.e., institutions) are getting rattled and some are crumbling. 

Usually, we … ah crap … usually we build back better.

(Don’t let that turn of phrase lead to you think you know my politics — you’re probably wrong). 

We learn that we’re living on top of a fault line and need to build strong foundations and use more agile engineering to last the next rumble. 

We fix some inefficiencies but also build in some new ones because we build back too quickly. 

Ultimately, we navigate out of the wreckage with prettier things and our trauma ignored.

Maybe I’m making an argument for not ignoring the trauma as it is happening.

No matter, to go from suffering to struggling to thriving requires hyper-awareness and hard choices. 

Choosing to bring FB in my life in 2006 was the right choice. 

Choosing to extract FB from my life in 2022 is also the right choice. 

Look how much influence FB has on us. My relationship to FB is rather benign. But here I am, writing a lengthy essay about deleting my account. 

I could delete my account and no one would really notice. That’s not the reason for this writing … and posting on FB before deleting said account. 

The reason for writing is to engage with a process of thinking through an action. And being transparent about that thinking.

We make approximately 35,000 decisions a day. Most are unconscious and necessary for our survival. Others we agonize over, not realizing we could “automate” some of them. And then others we don’t agonize over enough. We just do. 

When I delete my account this month, I will stop seeing posts from family, stop seeing birthday reminders, and stop seeing successes and tragedies of life. 

I might miss these things. But if I’m brutally honest, most of my viewing on Facebook is vicarious in nature. My real social network is very, very small. I have very few real, close friends (always have). Facebook presents this oddly artificial and inflated association to a social network that bears little resemblance to my real life.

I’m not interested in being an interloper, which is what FB feels like to me. 

Spending the few hours writing and rewriting this essay fills up my cup. It gives me what I seek — engagement in the processing of thoughts to full ideas organized on a page. 

If you’re reading this and have made it to this point, well, thank you. I appreciate your participation in a thing that brings me joy. 

I won’t be sharing these essays on Facebook any longer. I have my own digital domain for that — both my personal and company websites. 

You are reading from my personal blog now, but you can also subscribe to my company newsletter. 

I’m on Twitter too, but that’s another place that’s starting to lose its value. 

The one social media environment that remains valuable is LinkedIn. I would be thrilled to connect with you there. 

If you really want to stay connected with me, phone, text, or Signal are the most immediate touchpoints.

Let’s stay in touch.