Trust and Trust Some More
Knowing that many of us are grappling with our relationships to social media, I thought I’d share some of my process as of late, particularly as it relates to Facebook.
In the past few days, I’ve unfriended 2,299 people. As of this moment, I now have 1,817 Facebook friends, and it’s likely that number will continue to get smaller in the coming weeks. I remember about 10 years ago, someone I was in a brief relationship with barbed me about how many Facebook friends I had. The number stuck because it corresponded with a famous novel, “Fahrenheit 451,” and I think I might have written a blog post about it. A quick calculation reveals that I’ve become “friends” with an average of approximately 366 new people per year for the past decade.
Facebook caps your friends list at 5,000, and I’ve watched with a mixture of fascination and discomfort, the kind that tells you something is off even if you can’t put your finger on it, as my number has crept in that direction. While in the past, I discerned friend requests based on who we knew in common or what I could see of someone’s public profile, at some point along the way, as circles widened and the platform changed. I’d notice surges in friend requests after a major political event -- all of us desperately seeking to connect, commiserate, and organize.
I also began to notice something more disturbing. The more friends I had, the more friend requests I received. If I wrote a piece that got a lot of “shares,” I’d get a flurry of friend requests. Clearly an algorithm was at work, showing and suggesting my profile to more people. This in itself felt yucky, like a middle school popularity contest I never signed up for yet was clearly complicit in playing along with.
One of the things about Facebook is that it thrives on Facebook. How many times have I posted something about the platform itself, the ways it has changed or the ways it does harm? By keeping my focus on Facebook, I am participating in something so labyrinthine and circular one has to wonder what the point is. And yet - the point, the point. The chorus of, “but there is good here, too,” or, “it’s just a tool.” I agree with both of these statements, but unto themselves, they haven’t changed the fact that for a while now, I have felt less like I’m connecting or even “using” Facebook as a tool, and more like I’m spending swaths of my life walking through an airport. Snippets of conversation, an endless parade of meals and outfits, some of which are quite enjoyable, a rally at Gate B-3, a fight about masks in the Cinnabon, occasional serendipitous and deeply kind encounters, giving money to someone who has been living in a bathroom or signing a petition after TSA agents yet again profiled someone based on perceived race or gender, impromptu poetry readings and academic lectures, here and there bumping into an old friend or really getting to know a new one during a long wait for a flight that never seems to come. The lights never dim, the stores never close, and every time you think about looking for the sliding exit doors, you get distracted by something and put it off for another day.
As a solopreneur and as a writer, my goal could be to get in front of as many people as possible. And I write “could be” knowingly, as this trajectory has caused me to tune in more honestly to how it felt to see this number creep up towards that 5,000 limit. What was I doing? What was the end game here? Why did it feel like a game at all? Most insidiously, I was aware of the sneaking beliefs that some part of me bought into -- that it would be “bad” for me somehow to let people go. Just writing this makes me cringe, with its implication that people are assets rather than, well, people. Yuck. But if we’re not awake, this is what these platforms do. They slowly erode our empathy and our ability to remember to relate to each individual as a whole person, something everything in me rails against yet against which I’m clearly not immune.
Things have been steadily shifting towards that particular kind of loneliness a person experiences among a crowd, along with an increasing preponderance of people who seemed more intent on selling rather than sharing. Facebook would have me believe that more is always better, and I have found myself continuously questioning what that means to me personally and what truth it holds, if any. More and more, I see the corrosive effects of a culture that tells us bigger is better, an orientation that is completely at odds with what I value most.
I am not here to collect followers, nor does one have to be my “friend” on social media in order to read my writing or to work with me. Examining my relationship with social media has also led to uncovering an old pattern of people-pleasing, which in the past has led to porous boundaries based on fears and falsehoods rather than genuine relationships. It also bears noting the obvious: relationships take time, consistent presence and effort, and care. Facebook makes this very difficult, since the more “friends” we have, the less we may see of the people we actually know.
Realizing that paring down my friends list has everything to do with exercising healthy boundaries -- which, as Randi Buckley teaches, can be hard but are entirely possible for kind people -- is what pushed me over the edge this past week. That, plus just being tired of thinking about it and finally ready to take action. So, I pulled up my entire friends list and just started clicking the “unfriend” button. There were many whose names I didn’t even recognize. Those were easy. Others, I felt glad to let go of, people who called masks “muzzles” or whose profiles promised shiny marketing tricks and life-changing hacks and new bodies. And there were also many moments of a genuine, fleeting pang of loss, as if to say, you look like a lovely human, but there are only so many lovely humans I can connect with at a time. With these, I said a little whisper of wishing them well.
If I were wired differently, having 5,000 friends would have been fine. Each of us has our own relationship to social media, and I’m not here to judge. This process is giving me more room to breathe. More room, more room.
I am lighting my own way. And I choose for that light to be warm and close-in rather than glaring and overhead. I don’t want to spend hours everyday in an airport wandering the terminal, feeling the energy slowly drain out of my spirit. I want to gather in small spaces. I want to walk into wide open fields alone. I want to sit at my desk and jump up when my son and I spot the small neighborhood fox, the one who always walks exactly down the middle of the street. I want to hear from you in a way that really allows me to hear you and to listen. I want to learn from you in a way that really allows me to sink in and pay attention. I am tired of clicking around, tired of an endless scroll of names and faces I don’t recognize and never will, no matter how amazing many of them no doubt are.
Many years ago, not long after the “Fahrenheit 451” moment, I remember telling my wife that my dream was to reach a lot of people with my writing. I’m grateful that my life and work have continued to evolve in the direction of this dream -- and fully aware that social media has played a role in that. I’m also cognizant that clinging to old dreams can keep us from discovering new ones. I want to trust and trust some more that growing in the direction of smaller, deeper, quieter, more spacious, and more focused is not at odds with that dream but rather congruent with it, however paradoxical that may seem. For if I have learned nothing else so far in this life, it’s that the binaries don’t hold water. This is not an either-or proposition, but a way of being in the world that contains multitudes without getting lost in the crowd.