Mental wellbeing
On the advantages of quitting social media
Why I left Twitter and Facebook, and you might want to consider doing the same
Until recently, I was very active on Twitter and Facebook, sporting a somewhat enviable (my publicists tell me) following of about 50 thousand on Twitter and regularly participating to a popular forum on Stoicism, with 100 thousand members, on Facebook. Then I suddenly quit both. Or so it seemed from the outside.
In reality my decision to leave those virtual spaces had been a long way in coming, and had matured as part of my philosophy of life practice, which these days I think of as a type of skeptically grounded Stoicism. Stoicism teaches that the chief good in life is one’s integrity of character or, in an alternative formulation largely due to Epictetus, one’s sound judgment (“prohairesis”). Everything else, certainly including one’s number of followers or “friends” on social media, is at best a preferred “indifferent,” meaning that it may have value, but it doesn’t affect our character or judgment.
Or so I thought. You see, I always considered (most of) technology to be morally neutral. Sure, atomic bombs are very bad and vaccines are very good, other things being equal. But the good or bad that derives from much technology lies in how we use it, not in the tech itself.
Social media seemed a perfect example. Yes, I was aware that people bully and troll others on those platforms. I knew that such platforms were frequently used to spread fake news and alternative facts. And I realized that many users do not appear to be interested in constructive dialogue and the free exchange of opinions.
Yet, I thought, this is their problem, not mine. As far as I’m concerned — I repeatedly told myself — I’m going to use Twitter and Facebook to broadcast my own work or that of other people I think ought to be better known, as well as to engage in quality conversations with people from all over the world.
I was able to maintain this self-deceptive view of social media for years. But then the evidence began to accumulate that these technologies are most definitely not neutral. They are intelligently, largely malevolently designed to exploit their users and make billions for the corporations that provide such “free” services. Duh.
For instance, Facebook engineers added the infamous “angry” button to our options because they realized that people are far more likely to be drawn by posts that anger them than by less emotional and more informative ones. And anger, for a Stoic, is the quintessential unhealthy emotion, which ought to be fought against, not indulged in:
“Anger [is] a short madness: for it is equally devoid of self control, regardless of decorum, forgetful of kinship, obstinately engrossed in whatever it begins to do, deaf to reason and advice, excited by trifling causes, awkward at perceiving what is true and just, and very like a falling rock which breaks itself to pieces upon the very thing which it crushes. That you may know that they whom anger possesses are not sane, look at their appearance.” (Seneca, On Anger, I.1)
Indeed, for a Stoic something is preferred or dispreferred as a function of how it may, respectively, improve or undermine one’s character. I naively thought that social media were either neutral in terms of my character, or even helpful, since they pushed me to cultivate equanimity, patience, and other so-called virtues (i.e., character traits). But in fact the exact opposite was happening: I was getting more irritable, angry even. It turns out that the not-really-neutral technology implemented by platforms like Twitter and Facebook was slowly undermining the most precious thing I have: my character (or, again following Epictetus, my judgment)!
There was another thing social media was doing that may sound trivial when you mention it, but is, in fact, of capital importance: snatching large portions of my time. I knew this in exact quantitative terms, as I occasionally checked my “screen time” app on my MacBook and iPhone, realizing with increasing alarm that the “few minutes” I thought I was spending on social media were in fact sizable chunks of my day. Every day. Seneca reminds us that time is a very precious resource, which we can never recoup once we spend it:
“[People] never regard themselves as in debt when they have received some of that precious commodity — time! And yet time is the one loan which even a grateful recipient cannot repay.” (Letter I.3)
We spend time on all sorts of useless or trivial activities, or perhaps on things that others have convinced us are “important” while our clock keeps ticking:
“Hold every hour in your grasp. Lay hold of to-day’s task, and you will not need to depend so much upon to-morrow’s. While we are postponing, life speeds by.” (Seneca, Letter I.2)
Or, as Woody Allen famously put it, “Enjoy yourself, it’s later than you think!” Indeed, arguably it is the very fact that our time is limited that makes life meaningful. Plenty of philosophers have argued that immortality would be hell for a human being precisely because nothing would have urgency and, consequently, everything would become meaningless.
You may disagree, but immortality isn’t our problem right now, as it isn’t really an option. Rather, it’s our finite, relatively short timespan that we need to consider. We tend to think that we have an approximate idea of how long we have. In my case, for instance, the actuarial tables for a white male living in the state of New York tell me that I have an average life expectancy of 79 years. I am now 58, so I have about 21 more years to go. Not a lot, if you ask me, but surely enough.
Ah, but enough for what, exactly? To spend time on Twitter and Facebook arguing with strangers who by and large do not seem to be interested in learning a thing? I think not. (Here is how I suggest to answer that all-important question, by the way.)
Moreover, the expectation I have just mentioned is only a statistic. I don’t actually know how much longer I, personally, will live. It could be far longer than another 21 years, since after all my grandmother died at 96. But it could be far shorter, for instance because the plane on which I’m writing this — currently flying over the Atlantic Ocean on its way to New York from Paris — may plunge into the cold waters and that would be the end of it / me. (Luckily, since I’ve finished the essay and posted it, we made it!)
But, you may object, it’s too early for me to think about dying! I have all sorts of things to do yet! Yet Seneca reminds us that there is no set number of days we can count on:
“Surely you are aware that dying is also one of life’s duties? You are deserting no duty; for there is no definite number established which you are bound to complete.” (Letter LXXVII.19)
Since we don’t know when we’ll die, we need to shift our attention, from one of duration to one of quality, from being concerned with living as long as possible to being concerned with living as well as possible:
“It is not a question of dying earlier or later, but of dying well or ill. And dying well means escape from the danger of living ill.” (Letter LXX.6)
Which brings me back to the issue of social media. At some point I simply arrived at the conclusion that being (very) active on Twitter and Facebook was not contributing to me living well, on the contrary. So I quit.
This doesn’t mean I am not active in public, or indeed on the internet. I have simply chosen to focus on platforms and pursuits that are more likely to bring the results I strive for: better, more constructive dialogues with people who are interested in living a philosophical life.
That’s why I cultivate the readership of my blog and my one-man webzine, I use platforms such as Meetup to organize both in-person and virtual events, and I interact with readers of my books on GoodReads.
Might these platforms as well eventually reveal themselves to be Trojan horses bent on undermining my eudaimonia? Perhaps. As an aspiring Skeptic I will continue to review the empirical evidence while keeping my mind reasonably open. Not too open, though, or as Carl Sagan warned, the brain might fall off!