How to Disappear Completely...

That there, that’s not me… I go where I please…

I’ve always felt a kinship with Bilbo Baggins. I would not characterize myself as particularly brave, nor would I say I have a taste for adventure; those that I have I tend to get scooped up into by chance. I’m clever, but usually merely clever. I can write chance rhymes but could never pen the high poems of the elves. I like food. A lot.

So it seems fitting that, with my 35th birthday coming up, I’ve decided to mark the occasion in a particularly Bilbonic fashion by, as it were, disappearing completely. I have no ring of power to slip on such that I might completely escape my peers. Instead, I’ll be doing the next best thing: I have decided that, on my birthday (July 3) I will be permanently deactivating my remaining social media accounts and, barring some unforeseen apocalyptic reason, I will not return. This means, for me, no more Facebook and no more Twitter; also technically no more LinkedIn (lol).

I wanted, for my own sake as much as anything, to lay out in a relatively systematized way my reasons for taking this drastic step. I’m writing this post primarily as a means to order my own thoughts, but secondarily, I will freely admit, to publicly state my reasons for leaving in the hope that even one person (the one Kierkegaard loved to call “that single individual reader”) who reads this will reconsider their relationship to social media.

To be up front, and recognizing that there’s no way to say this without sounding a little unhinged: I believe that social media, whatever its minor incidental benefits might be, has shown itself to be utterly toxic as a force in society, to the extent that it cannot be meaningfully repurposed toward good ends absent a complete, top down overhauling of its basic mechanisms. I have tried and failed to navigate a middle path through the swap of social media — to regulate its uses in such a way that I reap its rewards without suffering its intense psychic costs — but I find that I cannot. Maybe that makes me weak; then let me rejoice in my weakness and recognize that I have to unplug. But I suspect that most people who feel like they are doing well on social media have been sold a bill of goods.

I’ll start with a noble sounding reason: social media impairs our ability to think well and deeply about issues of grave importance to human life and society. Frankly I’m tired of seeing people I care deeply about and/or respect deeply in a professional capacity make outlandish, insupportable, and sweeping claims about their supposed enemies online. The rewards structure and immediacy of social media prompts a constant stream of escalating rhetoric on every topic imaginable. For a very long time I’ve made a point not to post about current events, because such posts rarely amount to anything other than patting myself on the back for not being like those others. Yet I’m finding that abstaining is no longer enough for me. I can feel my ability to think carefully about issues being actively impaired every time I read some emotivist screed online.

Let me give one brief example of the diminishment of thought that occurs via social media. There’s a tendency, likely endemic to humans, to strain every single issue through a single preexisting filter, a tendency that sharpens on social media. So a certain type of person pushes everything through the filter of “capitalism” such that every issue gets resolved through a sarcastic, half thought out quip: that’s capitalism for you! Now in the interest of full disclosure I should say that I am far from being a fan of “capitalism” myself. But this lazy tendency to gesture toward a monocausal explanation erodes real thought in favor of signalling. It does very little good to ascribe all the ills of the world to a single factor like capitalism if you do not go through the effort to untangle the very real complications baked into various issues. So “capitalism” (or “liberals”, or whatever other term you might choose) becomes a shorthand way of showing others that you’re in on the game; you know how the rewards system of your allies works, and you’re more than ready to pull the lever in exchange for effusive praise, knowing winks, and the like.

But (I can hear my interlocutors object) how can you hope to improve the situation by leaving? To which I respond, how can I hope to improve it by staying? If in the very act of trying to resist the tides of thoughtlessness, I’m inflicting damage on my own ability to think, how can that be a sustainable situation? Again, perhaps others are stronger than I am, but I find I cannot have both my own intellectual integrity and a public platform on social media; so I will choose the smaller part and preserve myself. There are other ways to speak and work in the world, to try to do good, than by getting sucked into (even in a passive way) the toxic wasteland of social media discourse.

Ultimately what I desire is to be able to say, like Sy Ableman, that “I am a serious man.” And I’ve found it increasingly difficult to live that way with the tendrils of social media stuck into my brain. Thoughtfulness? Not possible. Contemplation? Please. Even at the level of basic task accomplishment I find myself constantly hindered by that still small voice telling me to go scroll through my homepage. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t think I have thoughts to be thought that will radically upend the world. I’m not a genius of thought. But I’m a gardener who has been given a little plot to cultivate, and I believe that in the end I will be asked to give an account of my tending of that garden. I want to be able to say that I did the work before me with diligence and constancy. I find those virtues impossible to pursue in my current situation.

As I said above, this all sounds very noble. Duty to thought, great. As if I’m Immanuel Kant or something. Let me dispel this fantasy by telling you the second reason I’m leaving social media, a reason rooted in self interest: it makes me miserable. Every minute I spend scrolling, weighing myself against others and finding myself wanting, saps a little more of my life force from me. Like dogs to our vomit, we keep returning again and again to something we know won’t satisfy us. Maybe this time it will. So we vainly cling to our posts, our likes and retweets, in an effort to scratch out some meaning. I’ve met some lovely people online, I really have, some whom I will feel a genuine pang of regret for no longer being able to see posts from on a daily basis. But I have done the weighing, and those minor joys cannot counterbalance the time lost, the anxiety fostered. Giving genuine time and attention to my wife, to my children, to my church, to my real, substantiated friends, yes, even to my own poor attempts at thought: these are things both worth doing in and of themselves, and goals that center me. What if the very thing making me miserable was also the thing holding me back? Why would I not then lop off its head and doubly free myself from it?

So I’m choosing to renounce whatever pitifully small public platform I have in favor of solitary, but not lonely, work. I’m going to redouble my efforts to finish my academic book and work to refine my teaching so that it’s the best it can be. I have a novel 3/4 finished and two or three more in the planning stages. I have a podcast that is the nichiest of niche products, but I love putting it out into the world (we’re keeping our Twitter since one of my co-hosts graciously offered to run it, but our Facebook page is a goner). And I plan to do more writing here. In particular, I want to keep an ongoing “reading diary” of sorts as I read through books that help me make sense of this world technology has built — thinkers like Jacques Ellul, Ivan Illich, Christopher Dawson, and more. Feel free to follow along, though you’ll have to seek me out now. I’m also committing to reaching out to old friends more, to praying a daily rosary with as many intentions as I can squeeze in (yes, that means I am praying for you, probably), and to playing as much pickup basketball as my aging husk of a body will allow.

Don’t be a stranger. Drop me a line via this website, or seek me out in other ways. I don’t see this decision as a means of rejecting people, but of loving them better. I may be disappearing from social media, but I’m not out of reach. I’m just planning to be a little harder to find.