Let it go, Jack.

I have a problem letting things go, especially things that I know—with certainty—are no longer good for me. I’ve had toxic relationships with friends, with lovers, with family, and without fail I held on to lifetimes of unnecessary stress and pain simply because I didn’t want to lose someone, or something.

I’ve also had something of a savior complex powering my stubborn refusal to recognize futility, willfully discarding my own advice to so many others that there is a time and place to simply give up.

Despite threatening to for at least five years now, my inability to let go and my fear of loss are the reasons that I haven’t quit Facebook.

Until now.

Mitote all day, everyday.

One of my favorite books is The Four Agreements, by Don Miguel Ruiz, which describes a stunningly simple yet lucid philosophy for living life. I won’t revisit the Agreements in detail (the book is a quick read, so go buy a copy), but one concept from Ruiz that I never fully appreciated is the notion of mitote. Simply put, it’s the fog that clouds our perception of reality, the beliefs and expectations we think to be true but are, in fact, nothing more than smoke that prevents us from seeing what’s in the mirror. It’s the deception we collectively and individually buy into.

And Facebook is at once both the cause of the mitote, as it provides an infrastructure for rapid, global disinformation, chaos, and dissension, as well as the mitote itself; it is the distorted reality through which so many are perceiving the world and their lives.

A social dilemma.

I’ve resisted deactivating my account there because it was the only reliable way that I could communicate with all my friends and family at once; for well wishes and for updates, for checking in collectively whilst we’re still experiencing the restrictions wrought by the pandemic.

That fear of loss, of course, is a distorted perception of the truth: my closest friends and family are a text, call, or email away. Also, it’s not as if I’m a hermit in a cave. If you’re a colleague or acquaintance and really wanted to get a hold of me, you’d find a way to do so without the artifice of the social network.

Ultimately, I couldn’t continue using a social media platform that has willfully done so much damage to our country and our planet, simply because it was a convenient way to share my latest endeavor or opinion with my friends list. And, to be quite honest, I was tired of seeing people I thought I knew and in some cases love propagate outright lies and hysteria, to spew poison into the public arena because somehow the ability to share information had suddenly endowed them with a combination of righteous moral certainty and unassailable intelligence.

I toyed with staying, to keep trying to set right wrongs, to using the platform for good rather than for evil. I realized, in the end, that I couldn’t continue fighting that good fight when Facebook’s algorithm is designed to provoke our worst emotions, when its own policies curry favor from those whose anger is hottest and whose threats are more severe. Even if I were to cast aside my qualms about its corrupt moral failings, Facebook was never going to be a safe, civil place to stay in touch if its entire reason for being was to agitate and to flood our feeds with paid agitation, to enrich its owners by selling endless mitote.

When I also discovered that Facebook Notes—honestly the only feature I’ve used to any effect for sharing my thoughts with everyone—was being eliminated on October 31st, the writing was on the wall.

What’s next?

My Time on Earth is a way to continue staying in touch with periodic updates on my family life, my health, and my work. I’m pretty sure there’ll be occasional sarcasm and random, witty observations as well.

It’s likely that I won’t be publishing more than once or twice a month and, if you want to receive an email alert when I do, you can sign up for free at the link below. If I already have your email I’ve added you but you may want to sign up just to be sure as I may have an old address; you can always unsubscribe at any time of course.

Whether you’re continuing the journey with me or if this is where we part, I continue to wish you nothing but the best. Be safe, be well.