This year, instead of having a New Year’s resolution, I have decided to have a Year’s End resolution: I want to delete my Facebook account by the end of 2025.
The reasons are varied. I spend too much time on it. The platform is nakedly pandering to authoritarianism. The benefits are not outweighed by the harms. Mark Zuckerberg is pretty horrible, actually. I read Careless People last month.
But I’m finding it hard, harder than it should be, to let this thing go.
For my age group, I was a late Facebook adopter. I got an account in 2014, because that’s where people organized college things at the time. Since then, I’ve put up approximately sixty posts. A good 75% of those are post calvin-related. Another ten or so are me trying to drum up business for library programs. The remaining handful come from my semester abroad in 2016.
My favorite parts of my Facebook account are the oldest. They’re also the ones I didn’t post myself: memes and tags from my siblings, old photos of my high friends, and broken links to things that my cousins thought I might find interesting. The nostalgic stuff. The stuff that’s a snapshot of who I was at the time, even if who I was was a frumpy nineteen-year-old who didn’t know how to do her hair.
I’ve downloaded my Facebook account in preparation for its deletion, so I’ll still have those things.
What remains? Since I got my account after high school, the people that I’d be most interested in using as schadenfreude never friended me in the first place. The few real friends I made at Calvin aren’t active users, and every other Facebook friend I met there is a mystery to me; half of them are now-married women who have changed last names and the other half are trans people who have changed first names. And if they were really friends, that wouldn’t stop me from knowing who they are, would it?
Apart from that, there’s the Feed.
The Feed is why I really want this thing gone.
The Feed’s job is to keep me around, and it’s good at it. It knows that I like anime and books, though it’s bad at figuring out specifically which anime and books I like. It shows me drag queens and reptiles when it’s worried I might log off. I’m pretty sure it thinks I’m fat, though it could just be showing ads for GLP-1s and shapewear to all the girls.
I do not like to consider how much time I have sacrificed to the Feed. It is probably time best counted in days. Most of what the Feed shows me is mildly entertaining short videos that it likely stole from TikTok, horror stories dredged up from the pages of semi-local newspapers, screenshots of tweets, and reminders that everything that we count on to make the country function is being dismantled.
Sometimes the Feed throws me a bone. It shows me a really cool LEGO build or lets me know that tickets for the limited run of that anime movie I was planning to see are now on sale. But don’t count on it.
The Feed bets that you’ll keep coming back, even though previous experience should have taught you that the Feed’s only offering is tepid amusement, because maybe, maybe, the next thing it gives you will finally be worth your time. (When in fact what it actually has for you is an improbable life hack designed to infuriate you and a false claim that Cynthia Lee Fontaine is dead.)
And yet I’m still reluctant.
What if I need to sell another used car on Facebook Marketplace? What if I’m ever back in England and want to try and meet up with one of my old friends from that semester abroad? What if someone I knew in college names their baby something really funny?
What if I’m even more out of the loop than I am now?
It’s easy for a person like me—analog lover, social media hater, perpetually holier-than-thou—to pretend like I’m immune to these platforms’ universally persuasive charms. These companies can be the juggernauts that they are because they are extremely good at making you feel like you will be missing out if you are not a participant. It’s hard to throw away something that’s been in your pocket for eleven years, even if you kind of hate that thing.
(And isn’t the Feed just showing me what I’ve told it I want to see?)
I’ve got a little over a month until my deletion deadline. If you see me on Facebook on January 1st, report my account. A bot has taken over in my corpse, and it’s going to try and sell you cryptocurrency. Or else extend a sinner some grace; this is harder than it looks.
