I deleted all my Tweets a month ago. Facebook got the chop this week. I'm still "on" both, silently, to stalk my very favourite people, but I'm done with the false idolatry.
I am not taking any fancy stand here, but all that internet pretending was making me weary and I was rather tired of the dance, pretty tired of the lost time and VERY tired of myself. Social media promised us a community rose garden but oh my God what a weedy patch of gravel we have made of it. I relinquish! If all my "friends" vanish into the shady ether well so be it. I shall simply go cycling. My mother says I am turning into my father. I suspect she is right, she always is.
There is a deeper issue, though, than little old me getting good and pissed off with the world. It is that our social media habits tend to mirror everything else - how we respond to the environment, how we treat our money, how we react to the constant litany of other people's expectations. And those last two can really get life's salt and grind it into our everyday wounds. It takes a hugely brave soul these days to resist keeping up with John and Jenny MustHave. In fact until Tuesday I thought my father was the only one in the universe. Now there are two of us. Wow, genetics huh?
Not only are we supposed to eternally measure up to this mystery superiority, we have had to plaster it all over the place since 2004 for all those living within a twenty thousand kilometre radius to devour. We must do it in just the right way, too - a process that suggests it was completely effortless (OMG YOU GUYS - SO EASY!) to buy this car, that house, the endless plastic frippery.
If you look carefully, you will admit to yourself that this whole thing is a giant act. For some, the acting, and I know this because they sit in my office in tears asking me what they are supposed to do about it, has real, damaging financial consequences. Social media has amplified the small smokescreens we all like to create to put on a good show for each other (even cavemen dressed up for dinner sometimes) and turned it into something darker.