Managing my Facebook addiction: No posts in 2019

I have been here before.

The parallels with real addiction, substance abuse, are uncanny. 

You try.  You succeed. You try to meter your intake, build a system to manage your tendency to spend way too much time and effort on social media… and you fail. You fail hard. 

One reason you fail? Because you can’t turn to social media to help you get off social media. And social media has hollowed our our traditional connections to each other, taking what existed before, our demonetized, data-free friendships, and converting that impulse into eyeballs, data,  influence, and cold hard cash.

Mostly for Mark Zuckerberg.

Sure, non-profits use it and businesses–they have to. But the cash isn’t shared with the content creators, whose personal data is what Facebook brokers, of course.

That is not how tech billionaires are made. 

Leaving the angry socialism aside, (which is way hard for me to do) I’m left with what is within my power to change. My own behavior. And how I interact with the networks of people who help keep me alive; who I help as well. 

With this in mind, I have commented on a few friends posts this year, and shared a dozen things. But I  haven’t written a post. The part of my brain that listens to the news and instantly begins composing my own brand of amateur citizen commentary chatters away without any form of release. 

So Sigh. Here I am! 

Welcome to my methadone maintenance program. 

As a friend of mine said, my stuff is fun to read because it isn’t monetized, or monetizable. Typo riddled but readable, with a strong voice, profanity, and unfair reasoning by analog, with the occasional novel reasoned argument thrown in for good measure. The infrequent valuable connecting of the dots compiled through compulsively reading real journalism…

But really, mostly, the only reason to read me is that I get to say fuck, and the stuff that Paul Krugman will say a few hours later in the day, in copyedited form, with the power of a Nobel prize in economics behind it.

Meanwhile, I don’t make a living wage as a writer and I make, near-zero dollars writing at FB. Full stop. ( I forced fifty friends to buy an anthology once with a series of posts and videos and small ads, earning less than 100 bucks. I could have made more in that time collecting cans.  I won’t do that again.)

I write for a few hundred or a few thousand readers, in the stories I sell to national magazines, the people who read my feed, the occasional shared post that is widely shared. (but only viral a few times in my, eh, ‘career.’) 

I love writing and knowing people read what I write. When I write in my blog here, I can see, clearly, the readership as hits. A tiny number of hits. In FB, I have to translate likes into reads in my head. Except in my vendor account, my pro author account, which nobody ever looks at, and which FB flogs me to advertise. 

In my amateur columnist / memoirist role at FB, there’s a random reinforcement schedule. Some things get dozens of shares and likes. Some get a handful. Some get none.

And as we all know, the random reinforcement schedule is the addictive core of the gambling urge. It draws marks to the casino table, the stock market, and to social media, looking to hit it big, with a viral hit that will redeem the activity financially.

But I’m ten years or so into this thing, and my ‘career,’ as Paul Krugman’s little typo-riddled non-nobel prize-winning brother with no hard skillset, but who gets to say ‘fuck,’ has probably accomplished all it can. So be it.

For all my belly-aching? I loved every second of it. 

I’m going to go write a marketing post now for a good friend, which I’m gonna say doesn’t break the no posting rule.

I’m going into the bar just to get a soda. For real.

I guess it’s one day a time. Day 3, no posts yet. We’ll see if I get to 365. 

Reading the feed and not posting is very hard. People’s relatives and pets die. People need answers to questions. People need support.

I’ll come back in 100 days, and tell folks that they can still ask for support, here, at the blog, or in personal messages or face to face meetings. I’ll check messenger–everyone know FB was letting companies access the actual content of these messages for marketing info, right?–to tell the few folks who really dig my stuff I haven’t been hit by a bus. I’ll get a half dozen of those messages.

Otherwise, that’s it. I’ll post here. When the readership is ten people, I can scale this effort down to what talking to ten people is worth in terms of money / career… which is fine! I pay ten bucks a month for this site. I should probably move it to free-wordpress, if I feel that the site hasn’t earned me 120 bucks of readership in a paid product. 

I’ll look at that next year.