Lessons in deactivation

We’re a month shy of reaching the end of 2018, this being the second consecutive year I’ve compelled myself to deactivate my Facebook account over a significant period of time. Throughout the course of these “experiments,” I’ve realized that said period’s span can be totally arbitrary. The shortest, if I remember right, was sometime late last year, when I deactivated for a mere two weeks. The longest wasn’t too long ago, when I deactivated between April to June of this year, to make up for my “reactivation” of the three months prior. I reactivated in July, and resumed deactivation throughout August and up until this time of writing.

This relative ease with which I flit between activity and “deactivity” feel like a world away from my initial vacillation of only a few years ago, when I recall having internal debates on whether I should detach myself from an online account that’s been a huge part of my life since 2009. (And I’m not kidding; so much of my time has been wasted pointlessly browsing my newsfeed.) It was sometime around late 2015, early 2016 when I started reevaluating my relationship with the platform, considering that many of the negative effects touted online were beginning to creep into personal sentiment.

I told my girlfriend of my deactivation plans, the embers of which had initially been stoked by my tad insecurity-slashenvy at viewing other people’s “highlight reels.” Here I was, early-twenties guy, brimming with crazy plans and ideals, yet having worked the same desk job for the past two years. Meanwhile, others my age were in their final year of law school, med school, grad school; snapping selfies in some frigid firstworld country; etc., often accompanying each post with a caption they ripped from Elite Daily or Thought Catalog.

It took a while (a full year and a couple of months), but I eventually did muster the courage to deactivate the account that had been so integral (maybe even dear) to me throughout much of my college and early yuppie years. The experience was…bizarre at first. After all, over the past couple of years, as pretty much everybody jumped onto the platform, FB had ballooned from a simple, less badoy version of Friendster, to an entirely alternate universe capable of warping one’s worldview and effecting change, for better or worse, in the real world.

And almost abruptly, that alternate universe where I burned so much time was now gone, replaced with less interactive media: pages of a book, online essays and articles, movies and series that had remained dormant in my hard drive for years. And with this consumption of traditional, “asocial” media, coupled with the requisite deactivation, came a certain bliss that I found surprisingly difficult to articulate to my girlfriend after a month of the experiment.

The word that kept coming back to me was comparison— specifically the absence of it. With FB’s newsfeed, along with the nasty algorithms behind it designed to make it so addicting, excised from my life, that sense of insecurity/envy rooted in the notion that I was somehow lagging behind my peers was basically snuffed out. Such a sensation, I’ve noticed, sees a resurgence only when: (1) I reactivate my FB, and (2) I encounter these people whom I can’t help but feel envious toward, on account of what they’ve revealed about themselves online, or what they’ve carefully curated that online image to be. Still, in both instances, the envy, the insecurity, that feeling of lagging behind, are contingent on the virtual realm, proving right published findings that social media, despite the unprecedented connectivity it affords us, contributes to depression and anxiety—feelings already in abundance in our capitalist, hyper-consumerist world. And before you argue that I’m just being “OA” about this, that social media is the defining innovation of our age, that one need only a strong backbone and firm convictions to combat potential depression and anxiety, allow me to move on to another lesson in deactivation: time. As a writer—and I have no doubt this rings true for many other creatives—I constantly fluctuate between feeling the urge to create something (a chapter of a long-gestating novel, a segment of a short story, a verbose essay on the FB-free life) and consuming media. A social media presence, while undeniably helpful in expanding one’s audience, is—in my case, or at least in this stage of my creative journey—more of a hindrance, especially since the time I spend online can instead be reallocated to consuming aforementioned asocial media. For it is only in understanding what made these works great in the first place, and examining them in a manner more intimate than the casual consumer does, that I too hope to better my own output, to hone my craft.

Overall, the deactivation experience these past two years has proven quite good—healthy even—to me. There are certain times when I do feel left out of a conversation, especially on topics that have gone viral, but this is a small price to pay. And when I do return to the platform on occasion, these moments are underpinned by a nagging sensation to unplug myself from the Matrix—especially during these particularly polarizing times.

I encourage anyone who reads this to engage in their own deactivation experiments from time to time. Perhaps you’ll come to realize that the online, oft-publicized life isn’t as essential as most others make it out to be, and that, indeed, maybe Mark Twain was right about comparison.