Ira Cogan

I re-download the app to my phone. I open up Facebook. There's a default feed in front of me. I don't understand it.

There's a post from UNICEF Ireland. The white text on black background reads “This week, a 12-year-old girl in a tent in Gaza was shot...” and I'll spare you the rest of the quote.

I scroll down a post. There's a humorous post from some entity I am not familiar with. The Scottish Sun. It's a picture of a handsome young man surrounded by attractive young women. The caption in the picture reads “Boston braces for Tartan Army baby boom as smitten locals enjoy kilted flings”. An accompanying quote reads “It takes a real man to rock a kilt.” I giggle.

I scroll down. There are posts from entities that I do deliberately follow. Most of them are posts about posts from other entities. ...Which is literally what I'm doing right now. For what it's worth, I'm using my own words. I navigate over to some of their pages. A lot of it is screengrabs of posts with snarky commentary or “right on” commentary. There's little to no original content.

I click on “feeds”, I click on “friends”, and there's a feed in front of me of posts from friends, and the posts are in some order I don't understand. No context is given to me that helps me understand why I'm looking at what I am looking at, in the order that I'm looking at it. It isn't chronological. Some posts are higher up. Some are further down. Some are left out altogether.

Was some of it worth seeing or engaging with? Sure. Am I any more informed about what some of my friends are up to or thinking about? Also, sure. But why do I feel like such a sucker every time I log on there?

Deep down I know why. I ignore it.

In my subconscious somewhere, I recall the stat that only 8% of Facebook interactions are between friends these days. Sounds about right. I'd say about 8% of my time and interactions there are with friends myself. How did that happen? I got trained into disconnecting from my friends by a “social” network.

The bell rings. I salivate. I remind myself that everyone is susceptible to this stuff and it is not a good use of anyone's time. Facebook may not be the only offender these days, but you can quickly trace a direct line between everybody else's behavior and Facebook's.

I snap out of it after about fifteen minutes. Thankfully, before I can even get to “reels” this time.

I navigate over to the “memories” or “on this day” feed and see if there are any tasteless old posts that need deleting. I log out. I remove my login information from my device. I get back to living life.

Repeat tomorrow. Hopefully minus the fifteen soul sucking minutes.

-Ira