Worth

It’s been a year since I left Facebook and eight months since I left Twitter. I would give you a thorough report about how it went, whether I’ve changed or now will be saintly enough to replace Mother Teresa’s throne, but that’s a story bound to be told in the next decade or so, when I’ve assuredly ripped the umbilical cord between me and the tools that have given birth to a domino of problems.

Quick disclaimer: I don’t promote leaving social media nor do I advertise its evils. It’s not Facebook that’s the problem. It’s me.

It’s me I don’t trust. (Don’t take it personally, Me, it’s not just you; it’s everyone.) At first, I could easily justify my departure as a direction toward productivity. I failed miserably at time management and the hours in my days dwindled quickly, thanks to time spent scrolling. You see, it’s not exactly the scrolling that’s the problem here, but the aimlessness of the scrolling, the upward flicking of the thumb to view content that we did not ask for, or content that will hopefully, possibly, maybe provide any form of facial movement (I have a resting bitch face so I know what I’m talking about).

Over the months though, while I’ve finally been allowed days all to myself, I’ve come to terms about what truly drove me to sever ties with platforms so permanently threaded into the fabric of our generation. I couldn’t admit it to myself before: I wrote posts for their likability and took photos for their trend value and tweeted for retweets. I wanted to be liked and favorited. I wanted to be approved of. Acknowledged. Validated. I craved for attention.

And I knew what that did to me, to my body, to my mental health. I slept at 4 a.m. I engrossed at screens on full brightness because the likes look more dazzling and the thumbs up look more real. The value of a share absorbed me, fulfilled my vanity and glorified my narcissism. I sold myself to people I did not know or people I never even liked and I was bought for cheap, because my worth was nothing more than two pennies of a like and a cent of a share.

So I left.

A lot of people ask me why I would sacrifice so much and go off the grid at the expense of connection. What about family? Friends? People who truly matter to you?

One thing I’ve learned so far in my bizarre attempt to become a better person is that when people need you, they will raise hell and high water to come looking for you. They will scour the Earth and swim through oceans and scream your name into the empty void of the universe and they will send you a text to meet up and hang out. That’s true human value.

In this age of fleeting attention, where our voice is relegated to five seconds of screen time before we are pushed upward and thrown into heaps of other wailing opinions, how many of us can honestly say they feel truly, deeply, genuinely wanted?