Deleting Myself (for now) From Social Media

Destroying the "self" to save the Self

Photo by Beau Carpenter on Unsplash

There is a long path though the woods of my little town. It's an old railway that's now flat and it’s covered with a finely-ground layer of chippings for hiking and biking. It's called the Ghost Town Trail. I went for a walk on it today, though it is cold and a misty rain falls paints the late October day with a wet gray. It's as if a cloud has fallen from the sky and landed on us.

Still I needed to clear my head and get out of the house and a four-mile walk though windy Halloween woods drew me out.

There was one spot on the trail I want to tell you about. One stretch of 200 yards where the trees arch into a canopy over the Ghost Town Trail. There, the trail is covered with bright, Fall leaves, plucked off their branches by the stiff, wet winds of the Laurel Highlands. The floor of woods bursts with colors there. Yellow birch leaves and maple leaves burnt to a spotty, rusted orange. It was beautiful. A patch of vivid color bursting through the gray melancholy of a dying year.

As a modern man, I instinctively reached for my phone to snap a picture. But then I stopped. What I was looking at was an image of decay's beauty. The best way to do it justice was, I felt, to let the image forever fade in my memory, to mold into eternity.

The idea suddenly struck me in the moment as aspirational. Might it be better to just live and die and dissolve into oblivion without stopping to document every detail of the experience?

Hitting Delete

I'm in the middle of teaching a class about social media, which has become an emotional challenge for me. The students are good; they deserve better than what I can give them. It's the material. Having to grapple each week with the anxiety of studying the phenomenon that is destroying our capacity for emotional well-being. Social media has replaced real life and we’ve lost ourselves in desperate frenzy to construct a “self.”

Everyone still reading this will conjure up images of the usual suspects: fake news, misinformation, trolls, bullies, and braggarts. Those are all poison, of course.

But let me tell you something important. Something you should know: pointing at all that toxicity and raging against it is no less poisonous. We've reached the end game of electronic new media; the critiques of it, no matter how wise and well-researched by experts, are just part of the machine now. Our wisdom about social media's evil is just part of social media's fuel now. The platforms will persist with or without it. If anything, the critics of social media (like me) only provide it with a healthier, balanced diet, FDA-approved.

I have enjoyed much about social media over the years, to be honest. Keeping in touch with people is good. Getting to know new people who I’ve never met in person is good.

And in the last few years, I've been striving to bring a more positive presence to my feeds, trying to be the silly huckster that lightens the mood. But even this is poison, really. If my jokes don't get enough likes, my stomach turns. How can this be healthy?

But how can one exist today without the platforms? It's fair to ask if one even does exist, in a practical, social sense, if they're not feeding the machine.

So here's the bargain I'm going to work for now: I will not delete my accounts, but I won't be logging on for a while. Whatever I do online will be limited to writing -- this newsletter and wherever else I might find a home for my work.

Substack has become a pretty good spot in the internet neighborhood to hang out, so far at least. In the private war between wanting to be heard and not wanting my voice to be lost in the rattle and hum, Substack and the other writing I do has provided a reasonable détente.

If I ever feel like I can handle it again, I might start posting again on Facebook (X-Twitter and all its clones are a lost cause for me - the speed they incentivize is heroin, not substance). Until then, just look for me here. Or, I suppose, just let me go.