Back on the Horse

Not exactly an auspicious start to my daily blogging habit, but giving up won't make it any better.

First thing's first. I quit Facebook. I haven't posted anything, or liked anything, or scrolled through the feed in over a week, and once I finish transitioning a couple Messenger conversations to different platforms, I will delete my account, never again to return. I used that website for thirteen years. Thirteen! I was barely cognizant of social media when I started. No Friendster or MySpace or LiveJournal. Facebook was just this silly thing where you could waste a bunch of time playing browser games and annoying people from high school. Now it's an advertising juggernaut (and almost singlehandedly responsible for ruining the internet). 

As I began to use Facebook more, I thought it might be "fascinating" to see my whole life documented online. Holy Christ. The sheer naivety of that statement. Of course, I wasn't thinking about privacy concerns, or data harvesting, or the surveillance state, or social engineering, or the spread of propaganda, or an insidious addiction to seeing icons light up with notifications. I just thought about me. Me, me, me. Because I was in college, and everything was about priming the pump for all the incredible things I was gonna do with my incredible brain. So much potential! I might have been more studious than a majority of my peers, but in retrospect, no less self-absorbed.

I'm sure I will miss aspects of Facebook. There are people on there with whom I will likely never interact again. There were moments that I still treasure. But I'm on Twitter, and I have to pick my battles. I can't be addicted to TWO worthless websites.

It's telling that my first Facebook profile picture was just a shot of my foot. He might have been naïve and over-eager, but College Karl had the right attitude about social media. So, goodbye, friends list. Goodbye, relationship statuses. Goodbye to writers groups and open submissions groups and RSVPing "maybe" to events. I'm free of you.

In other news, I'm going to be a dad super soon!

My lovely wife, whom I love more than anything in the world, is full-term. The scheduled date is January 8th, but baby could start arriving anytime. Holy shit. We both agreed that we weren't really going to post pictures of our son online, for the reasons mentioned above. Maybe a picture here and there. We're pretty excited, after all.