THANK GOODNESS it’s Easter, and Lent has concluded, and you’re back to eating chocolate or drinking wine, or finally stopped trying to meditate a half hour each night and just ended up noticing places that need dusting. But it’s still February for me, and I’m only on Day 10 of giving up Facebook.
So far, I’m 0 for 10. I can’t even do one in a row.
I didn’t commit to giving up Facebook altogether. One can go only so long without pictures of friends’ newborns or reposting that video of a hamster doing backward somersaults ... SO ADORABLE! But I had prayerfully pledged to stop making political comments online. And stop sharing elucidating articles from The New York Times, and stop forwarding snarky memes, and stop raging against demonstrable falsehoods posted by the angry and the prejudiced, specifically my relatives south of the Mason-Nixon Line. (How did these people get a computer!? Did they pass a background check first?)
Stopping Facebook cold turkey was the only remedy for a truth junkie like me. Because I was overdosing on outrage. The arc of the moral universe bends toward justice, but sometimes it needs to pull over, roll down the window, and shout, “Hey, Neanderthals, read a book!”
My addiction started out harmlessly enough with, you know, peer pressure. My friends were doing it—fighting the good fight for truth on the internet—and with my legendary skills as a writer person who can do, like, grammar stuff, I could be another righteous warrior in a world gone mad.
But it was making me mad, and I desperately needed to stop, for at least 40 days, as well as 40 nights. (I briefly smelled a Lenten loophole that would leave my evenings free to rant, but I couldn’t confirm it on Google.)
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