Playing for Time

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Good morning, friends. Less than a week in, how is 2024 spooling out for you? Lots of gray days here, a little snow in the air, and next Friday starts a run of cold (to us) days and nights. Daytime highs in the low 20s, with single-digit nights. It’s winter, so…

After reading a Facebook post ABOUT Facebook by a friend this morning, I’ve been sitting here thinking about what the platform means in my own life. My son made me aware of its existence shortly after his dad, my first husband, died, and against all odds (in my mind) it turned out to be my kinda place. Took me a while to navigate it to my benefit, but I was ready because until that point in my life I’d been laser-focused on pleasing the people around me, a tricky habit since it’s different strokes for different folks and somebody always gets shortchanged.

After the first couple of years on The Fakest of Books, the novelty of connecting with everyone I’d ever known was wearing thin, disagreements were becoming a regular thing, and I lacked the interest and energy for dealing with it. I thought about dropping out (which has happened a couple of times since) but decided to take a shot at making it what I thought it would be in the first place. I filtered my friends list big-time (you’re welcome, those who got a pink slip, I saved you the trouble), unfollowed, unfriended, blocked, cut sites I didn’t want to follow, locked things down like a ship in a storm and plowed ahead. The atmosphere changed immediately. It’s time for another big cull because now Facebook puts “things of interest” in our feeds and if we “like” them we’ve thereby adopted them. Cagey.

So, to do what I’m known for, I’ll make a long story longer…

We have to remember at the outset that nothing’s perfect. No environment will 100% nurture and support us, we’re imperfect, the friends we make are imperfect, life is not only imperfect but entirely unpredictable.

It therefore follows that if we were to discover a magically-perfect environment, we would automatically render it imperfect by our presence, so forget that. The only way to fly: try before you “buy,” check the temperature of a few places, set boundaries, and do what works for you. With Twitter now a “maybe” day-to-day I’ve checked into a handful of similar platforms, but the incentive to start over just isn’t there. That’s fine, the whole phenomenon, as we know it, may be reaching its expiration date anyway. Meanwhile…

“What Facebook Means to Me”

• It gave me a voice in my 50s when I most needed one
• It helped me build a network of support and friendship at a critical time
• It opened doors and windows for me, insight into a rapidly-shifting political landscape and avenues for open discussion about all of it
• It renews my appreciation every day for the people I meet there, the ones I read about, the creativity of humans, and often the kindness, which means the most
• It lets me share this blog, which is far less expensive than a lifetime of therapy
• Speaking of therapy, sometimes oversharing is underrated if someone is helped thereby

I’m suddenly uber-conscious that I’m closer to 80 than 70 at this point, and despite all my naive vows before the age of 50, I’m not loving the process. I like the age part and I hope to add a bunch more years to that, but the price of getting there is highly disrespectful and insulting. Facebook, because it’s what’s there, helps mitigate a few aspects of the aging process, including isolation, the blue lonesomes, the need to keep sharpening your wits by engaging with interesting people, the desire to see the world and its wonders because you know you ain’t gettin’ there in this lifetime. The Book of Fakes does nothing for wrinkles except advertise incessantly to us (how on earth do they KNOW??), but the people who remain on my friends list make the cut for being REAL, and they make life a better place to be than it would be without them.

THE END

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