ofREH

Hi.. uh.. I’m Roland and…I’m an addict.
“Hi Roland!! Keep coming back!”

Just about 30 days now, since I deleted my Social Media accounts, Facebook and Twitter.
The air is cleaner, the skies bluer, the horizon crisper.

If I’m honest, it really hasn’t been that difficult, and I recommend the exercise of purging for everyone.
The greatest challenge for me, was the routine. The morning ritual of coffee, cigarette, iPad email-Slack-Facebook-Twitter. In that order.

Facebook, the easier to do without.
While I do miss updates from Family and a select group of Friends, those instances were getting farther and farther apart and one needed to sift through countless ads and repeating posts that are specifically geared to the user through algorithms, and generally miss the mark.

Twitter, the more egregious of why I purged, but whose absence was felt more pointedly.
I rarely tweeted but did rely on it for critical news updates and succinct analysis. With 30 days clean, you can perhaps imagine my looking on in smug sanctimony (as addicts are prone) while rending garments, pearl clutching, and ululating take firm hold in my own home, with the threat of the end of The Tik Tok.
Poor Michele.
China will have one less unwitting agent at it’s disposal.

In the twilight of my addiction, I never adopted Instagram, so I certainly never embraced  the Video Instagram, Tik Tok.
That said, Social Media, and Tik Tok in particular, was not without its advantages.
Michele gleaned binders of helpful snippets from its pages. (Who knew about Watermelon with cinnamon, or air fried peaches!?!)

Now that I’m free of the grip of Social Media, it feels easier to look on it objectively, to gauge those advantages, or disadvantages.
Now I simply pen these ramblings to the aether, instead of posting in the Facebook, relinquishing the bind of gauging my self worth in Likes, comments, and views.

I do miss the earlier days of Facebook, where I would battle with Friends and strangers over politics or current events, but that bygone era was noticeably exchanged for one where posts resembled billboards.
Virtue signaling is not open to debate, in the end.

It remains to be seen if the exercise is as indulgent as it once was. If this medium will satisfy, as methadone does heroin.