I already decided to dial way back on Facebook, including copying down photos and posts but it’s just part of a bigger personal shift.

I’ve always been technical (for values of “always” from age 8 onwards) but some things have gotten out of hand and I intend to adjust my habits as a result.

My opinion is that we never adjusted well to everything the internet brought. Collectively, we didn’t develop healthy skills and cultural norms around having the sort of access we quickly found in our computer labs and workplaces, first, then our homes and ultimately in our hands.

Looking at habits - I’ll focus on my own but it’s pretty pervasive - I’ll often intend to look something up and get distracted on a social media feed and, before long, a decent amount of time has passed and I might even not remember what I intended in the first place. Whether that amount of time is five, ten, twenty minutes or more, it doesn’t matter: it’s time I didn’t intend to spend.

It doesn’t feel bad, as such, as I caught up on friends’ activities, right? Or saw some videos delivering dopamine hits. Or caught up on news. Or “news”. Or…

That’s the trick, though. It’s ultimately the equivalent of empty calories; satisfying in the short term but not nutritious, so to speak. Not that everything has to be productive or that frivilous dopamine hits aren’t useful, but social media companies know our buttons…

If many social connections are a click or swipe away, we can connect with friends and family (or “connect” without connecting). We don’t have to meet in person, we don’t have to wait for a shared activity or even schedule something, it’s there when and where we want it: our phone or computer. With enough social media connections, there’ll always be new updates and you wouldn’t want to miss something…

Same for news, infotainment, edutainment, memes, cat or dog videos…

My weakness, I’ve realized in recent weeks, are the FB Reels of street food or professional chefs in actual kitchens from around the world. There’s usually no recipe delivered, minimal or no text, sometimes not even any relevant audio. Just something presented by the algorithms and consumed by me.

It’s terrible. And great. But mostly terrible, for me.

I enjoy it and can sit and watch a few in a row, easy. But the Feed ensures I can only see so many in a row before I should get back to the Feed itself of Real Posts, right? Until it interjects with another batch of the same.

…but I don’t have anything to show for it when I’m done, except lost time and a fleeting dopamine hit.

At least if I spent that time gaming, there might be some problem solving or socializing, if the game was right and/or timing lined up with others to enjoy the game with…

So here’s my intention, going forward: reframe my interaction with social media. Don’t disappear, necessarily, but dial back; engage on my terms and encourage other formats, other networks that aren’t as abusive in terms of whether we’re users or consumers.