Well, here goes my first transmission after having quit reading and posting to Facebook for the rest of this year. I have long been in the habit of posting here, and then putting links and excerpts on Facebook for my contacts there to see, but today, this is it. And we’ll see who stops by to read this.
The hiatus is for several reasons. In no particular order, these are some of the top ones:
- Concern for my own mental health. Read this.
- Dissatisfaction with the conversation at Facebook.
- Protest over the Zuckerberg/Big-Tech corruption.
- That nagging concern that I should be studying more than I have been (and that Facebook has been a waste of valuable time.
So, we shall see in the days to come just how addicted I may have become to Facebook. And we shall see how vulnerable I am to the Fear of Missing Out. Indeed, here on my blog, it’s a big day if I get more than ten visits in a day, and it’s a huge year if more than five people contact me about something I’ve written.
Slippery Slope
For years, I have craved meaningful, substantial conversation―and have mostly done without. And I have long realized that our society is fast on its way down the slippery slope to dullness (as you can see here in this short complaint about why customers can’t read a web page anymore). When I graduated high school, I was just getting started with my learning and engagement in life, but it seems that some substantial segment of our society was trying to wrap things up. And it gets worse every year, it seems. To learn that it is by design seems to have a lot of explanatory power.
So, I finally got tired enough to face the music. I finally admitted that I wasn’t getting anywhere with Facebook, and that it’s something akin to the Gambler’s Fallacy that I would keep going back there in hopes of good conversation. But it almost never seems to come. And the downside seems to increase, the more ads and nonsense and AI content flood that platform.
No, thanks. I’m out.
In the Blind
So now I write, “in the blind”, as the astronauts say when it’s unclear if their transmissions are being received. And I have the feeling I’m writing mostly for myself, to chronicle my thoughts―using this blog as my own scratchpad as I continue to try to make (good) sense of this beautiful/ugly world.
