TL;DR: I’m deleting Facebook for my own mental health and will probably be more active here. Suck my dick.

OK so no shit, I’m putting aside 50% of my social media. Why? I’m fucking tired of divisive politics, it’s that simple. Granted, I literally only have Facebook and Instagram at this point, but the last few months of this COVID-19 bullshit has convinced me that one of the most toxic aspects of my life has been Facebook. I made it a major part of my life, primarily because I loved the inter-connectivity that it allowed, to reach out and talk to not just friends and family but people in groups about everything from specific gun manufacturers on the bright side to political issues on the dark side. That said, in the last five years, I’ve found that I have this strange fascination with arguing with people I disagree with, both in a respectful manner and in the typical online troll style. It’s incredibly unhealthy, for me, to even have respectful discourse with people to the level that Facebook enabled me to have.

The problems that some of these discussions have caused has alarmed me for awhile. As fucking stupid as that sounds, I was basically allowing conflict to fuel anger and hatred towards people I disagree with. Does that sound healthy? Fuck no, snake. About two years ago, I started to recognize what was happening with me and began flirting with deleting my profile from time to time. I’d deactivate it for a few days, or even a few weeks one year around the holidays, just to allow myself to decompress from the way that the discourse surrounding certain social and political events were causing me to feel. Doing so always made me feel better, without social media to read and comments to reply to, I basically gave myself the space to exist without sharing my own opinion or caring about what anyone else thinks.

Does that sound ridiculous, that a full grown man was so upset about the shit he was seeing online that he deactivated his account? Oh fuck yeah, it is. Call me a snowflake, a pussy, a libtard, whatever you want, I simply recognized how my reactions to discourse were making me feel. I’m self aware, motherfuckers. At least, as self aware as a 27 year old man can be without a ayahuasca or DMT experience. By the way, shout out to the 21st century man himself, the podcasting legend, Joe Brogan (not a typo) for encouraging self awareness in forms that many people are not willing to seek out and embrace. In typical bro fashion, the homie spoke to me (and his whole audience) in a way that resonated on a level that encouraged and motivated me to start looking for toxicity and stagnation in my own character development to fix it and be a better version of myself. It’s cool, dude. Embrace it. It’s 2020, fixing yourself is cool as fuck now (if it ever wasn’t).

On top of everything else, Facebook took the place of real interaction and discourse with people I actually love and care about. I would e-argue with some people that I have known since I was knee high to a grasshopper, and it took away from the relationships that I had in the real world and replaced them with angry disagreement that was often a two-way street. Why would I want to hurt those relationships, over opinions that literally do not make a difference in the world at all? I think that’s something that many people miss out on recognizing, that internet activism and virtual signalling (see what I did there?) is toxic to how we interact with people who think and see the world differently. Of course there are benefits to be exposed to this sort of discourse, and open discourse is incredibly important, but the levels of trolling and bullshit that occurs online is causing a increasing divide that is far from beneficial to the social discourse in the United States.

So what does this all mean? My Facebook is about to disappear. Facebook is very much the center of a lot of controversy (I hope you read that in a British accent, like con-trov-ersy, because that’s how I wrote it). The melting pot of political ideologies and divergent view points is not seen in most other social media, save for smooth brains on Twitter. That said, I downloaded all my FB data and I’m deleting it permanently in a day or so.

I’m still going to hold onto my Instagram accounts as a way to document life and the passing of time, and this space as a way to do exercise something I really enjoy, writing. Absolutely nothing political will be here or on Instagram, save for funny shit like someone I do not know trying to sell me something completely illegal and making me paranoid as fuck that the ATF is watching me. Side note; hello Fed Boys, pls don’t Waco me and shoot my dog, I don’t have a dog so you can’t satiate your bloodlust. What pops up here is simply a way for me to express ideas and thoughts, and maybe share something that I’m passionate about like firearms, the outdoors or military history. If nothing else, at bare minimum, I’m expressing myself. If someone gets a laugh or learns something, fuck yeah I’m all about it.