Returning to Facebook, or on the completely irrational allocation of my time
time flies, lots of flies, maybe take out the organic for once.
I left Facebook many years ago and never wanted anything with it anymore. That is until Meta made it impossible to have a business Instagram profile without a Facebook profile connection.
I sheepishly came back to oblige a few years ago and marveled at the ridiculous hellscape it had become during my absence. I added about a hundred contacts to avoid being flagged as a fake account, and that was about it—or so I thought.
Every once in a while, I would check the feed out of curiosity and found it completely uninteresting and empty, as most of the people I was interested in were on Instagram or WhatsApp. It didn’t take long for the feed to slowly populate with content I was feebly interested in—mostly controversies, people’s angry comments, and radical bad takes.
I started reading more and more feebly interesting things for more and more hours every week for no specific reason other than it was there.
At some point, I wondered why I would spend so much of my little free time reading things that were only vaguely interesting but mostly dull, so I installed a feed eradicator and stayed logged in for work. At the same time, I uninstalled Instagram from my phone.
The first thing I recovered was a lot of time—but that was kind of irrelevant. Outside of working hours, I have the right to do unproductive and stupid things for hours, and scrolling on feeds was simply one of those things. The main valuable thing I recovered was instead mental space and a bit more clarity about the things I could be interested in doing—that is, things that were very interesting and not just vaguely interesting.
And that’s kind of great, considering that we only get to live once on this earth unless you believe in reincarnation, but even if you did, you would still believe that you only get to live once under these precise circumstances, so you may as well try and do the most interesting things possible rather than not for your present circumstances—I guess. And also, you may not get to read angry comments on Facebook anymore once you are a worm (and that’s probably for the best). The main takeaway from all of this is, God only knows what worms are up to, or maybe I am just being wormphobic.
I am one of those annoying people who doesn’t have a TV. When people hear about it, they are always surprised and ask me why, and I invariably answer, ‘Because I don’t watch it.’ But the reality is more the other way around. I don’t watch it because I don’t have it. If I had it, I would probably watch it all the time. I watched an entire episode of a soap opera in Portuguese once (but that’s a story for another time and no, i don’t know any Portuguese). I also watched an entire tv sales of sea cucumbers in Chinese Mandarin (but that’s already more… “understandable, understandable! Yes, it’s perfectly understandable. Comprehensible, comprehensible. Not a bit reprehensible, it’s so defensible!”1).
I don’t know why I do what I do sometimes, I just know that I don’t want to do it and that guides me to find ways not to do it.