Pulling the Plug

July was an eventful month for me. I went on a 3 week trip to the mountains of Western North Carolina to visit family and friends, preached twice, attended a 3 day Bible seminar with my wife and no kids, caught 8 trout, attended a wedding, found an 8oz bag of Penzance at my favorite tobacconist along with a year and a half old tin of SixPence and a 2018 Savinelli Christmas Pipe, and then when I got home I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts.

For 5 years I’ve found myself repeatedly trying to manage my social media usage, but time and again my self imposed restrictions fail and I’m mindlessly scrolling through memes, videos, and pictures for untold hours. (Did you know you can read the whole Bible in 72 hours?)

Last week something changed. Ironically a man who I only know through Facebook, posted a Ted talk to Facebook, about the pitfalls of social media and announced that he would be leaving social media. This started me thinking. What real benefit does social media provide me? Do these said benefits justify all of the wasted time, and not being present? I was beginning to think not. The next day I visited my home church and a friend told me that he had been off of social media for a year and didn’t miss it. This conversation reinforced the growing suspicion that what ever perceived benefits of communication and connection that were achieved through Facebook and Instagram, could be had apart from these platforms and that the necessity of these networks was actually an illusion.

Let’s be honest. You think about an old friend from high school you haven’t seen in years, you look them up, you send a friend request. The obligatory “haven’t seen you in years, how you been?” messages commence, and then…. You occasionally see a post from them and give it a like. There is no real connection made, no authentic relationship re-established. Most of our internet connections are the equivalent of running into someone at Walmart, having a quick surface level conversation and then strangely receiving tid bits of personal information from them throughout the day. It’s weird. I would also go out on a limb and say that the people we actually know in real life, and are close with are people we call on the phone, send text messages to, and actually spend time with in person. We’re not close with everyone we know, we don’t actually have 457 birthdays written in our personal calendars so we can send out cards or gifts, and those same 457 people who posted happy birthday on your wall only did so because it came up in their feed. When my wife, kids, mom, dad, siblings, cousins, close friends, have birthdays, I tell them in person, attend their parties, and give them gifts. If they live on the other side of the country, I call or text. All that to say, these internet connections are mostly synthetic, we don’t actually care as much about everyone as we pretend online, and we’re not really that close with everyone.

I do value a lot of the connections I made online and am grateful for the genuine interactions I’ve had. I was a part of a couple of great groups with great people, who if they lived in my neighborhood would probably be real friends who came over for dinner and shared tobacco. Before I left social media I gave out my email and received a couple so that I could stay in touch with some of these people. But the value of these people’s character and personality isn’t dependent on whether or not we stay in touch online, it doesn’t mean they aren’t people I wouldn’t genuinely enjoy hanging out with, it simply means our real world lives don’t actually intersect and we don’t actually have opportunities to hang out.

I don’t really know where I’m going with all this. This isn’t to encourage you to quit social media, it’s just my ramblings on the subject and a little bit about why I left. I haven’t been away long enough to enumerate the effects it’s had on my life or to even say it’s had an effect. But I do know that at this point I don’t miss it, I don’t need it, and in it’s absence I intend to live on purpose in real time with real people.