When I was a kid, I loved playing video games. My parents were divorced by the time I was six years old, and I think part of my dad trying to make it up to my sister and I was to spoil us when we were with him every other weekend. I only had a SEGA Genesis with a couple of games for it and all the other kids had cooler consoles. If we were spending the weekend at dad’s house and he asked us what we wanted to do, I usually wanted to rent a game console from Blockbuster and play with my friends.
I spent a fair amount of time kicking my friends’ asses at Goldeneye 64, but we always got kicked out of the house at some point. My dad didn’t let us sit there in front of the TV all day on Saturdays – he made us “go play.”
We had a shitty, net-less basketball hoop in the driveway and we would pretend to be the Bulls. Marcus and Tyrell, a couple of Black kids from down the street, always fought for Jordan and Scotty Pippen. Neil liked to be Rodman, since he thought he was a badass. I was always cool with being Horace Grant, because I didn’t like being in the limelight. Plus, I thought his glasses were cool.
There was also a canyon behind our school. At one point it had been a dump, then the city filled it in and set up a man-made lake next to it. Some days it was as simple as finding a rusty nail and a sharp piece of glass to play with. We would try to find snakes or track down the neighborhood fox, as if we were somehow going to be able to corner or trap it if we even found it. We would play three flies up or horse, then drink from the garden hose in the front yard because we didn’t want to go inside. Sometimes we would walk all the way over to the lake to fish or ride our bikes down to the taco shop and make ourselves sick on candy, soda, and carne asada nachos. Sometimes we’d hang out in Neil’s tree-house and see if we had good enough throwing arms to splash rocks into the neighbor’s pool three houses over.
In the early 90’s, the internet had only just started to be a thing that people knew about, cell phones weren’t widely used yet, and my dad still read the morning newspaper. We had a rotary phone that hung on the wall in the kitchen and sometimes, rather than calling him, I would just walk to Neil’s house to see if he was home. The world was slower, less sensational, and more forgiving. Even at that age, I can remember enough to tell you that generally, people then were kinder, more patient, and less full of themselves. It was a different time, even though it wasn’t that long ago.
It seemed like overnight, the internet was injected into our lives, rendering my entire two shelves of Encyclopedia Britannica obsolete. I was proud of those, and I wonder if kids even have to cite their sources anymore. Information was a search away; communication took just a quick e-mail. Everything became more readily available, more accessible, more “connected.”
I also grew up with off-road racing being a huge part of my life. My dad was always engaged in that sub-culture, and I estimate that I have been to Mexico on at least fifty occasions. For years, we would make several trips a year: the Baja 1000, the 500, the San Felipe 250, and Pete’s Camp Poker Run, at the least. In Baja, out in the middle of nowhere with the night stars above and just the food and equipment you brought with you, there was no “connected.” It was the opposite – quiet and peace and freedom. It was being in the moment and participating in something that would become a memory. It was being “connected” to what was in front of you, not the world in its entirety all at once.
My first cell phone was a Nokia brick, the big heavy one that you could knock someone’s teeth out with. It had one game on it – Snake. My mom told my sister and I that she needed to be able to reach us at any time. I was busy being a nerd in marching band and my sister was busy being cooler than me even though she was younger, so my mom was worried because we were both out in the world doing things and being around people. But she had a right to worry, she was Mom.
I didn’t want the phone – I thought it was annoying. I didn’t want anyone to be able to reach me at any given moment of their choosing, especially in certain circumstances, my mom. I thought it was a wonderful thing to decide to be unreachable until you decided not to be. I wasn’t “cool” in high school, and no one really needed to get a hold of me. If I wanted to go hang out with my nerdy friends for the weekend, then fine – I didn’t have a care in the world that someone else wouldn’t call.
Then Facebook. The epitome of connected-ness. But also? Social engineering, data leakage, and drama. Oh, the drama. I hated Facebook, too. Even though it didn’t come around until I was about 20 years old, for me, Facebook was simply an extension of the worst parts of the real world. The part of the world that had bullied, mocked, and shunned me for years. In some ways it was worse because people didn’t even need to have the courage to address you to your face. They could reject or insult you from behind a screen and not only would everyone still find out about it instantly, but there was also a record of what happened.
I grew up. The things that people said online started to mean less, I cared less, and it affected me less. But I also never truly fit into it, even though I continued to participate. I never bought into creating this sort of online persona or presence. I didn’t care if people liked the stuff that I liked or even if they read my posts, on the rare occasions I made them. I never had a Twitter account, I still don’t know what Snapchat really is or how it works, and my Instagram account hasn’t had a post to it in years – it’s all just food pictures anyways. My communication style has always been too “me,” (whatever that may mean) to be effective or rewarding over social media. In short, I just never really gave a shit. I used it because I felt obligated, but I resented it. I have always thought that it was a waste of time and brought the worst out in people.
Five years ago, when I was 34, my dad passed away. Stage 4 cancer. It happened quickly. In the drama following his passing, I saw the real evil that people could bring to bear when they chose to leverage the connected-ness of social media. One of the best decisions I’ve ever made was deleting my Facebook account to get away from it.
Social media cheapens our human experiences by reducing, or in some cases removing, the consequences of interacting with other people in person. The paradox of social media is that in its attempt to allow people easier access to each other, it hamstrung our good old-fashioned face-to-face social skills. It has driven us apart and made us less able to communicate and empathize with other human beings. It’s like having permanent training wheels on when going into your intra-personal interactions. If you never develop in-person skills, you’re doomed to have to socialize through electronic means. And I would argue that socializing through electronic means isn’t truly socializing at all.
Especially at a young age, humans need to interact with others in order to learn how to cope with life. We need to be bullied. We need to feel bad. We need to learn how to win and how to lose. We need to cry. We need to get hurt, and within reason, hurt others to learn what is acceptable. We need to celebrate. We need to share. We need the ups and downs. We need these lessons to learn how to cope and protect ourselves, how to build durable relationships, and how to fit into social structures.
Social skills are practiced and learned by performing them. If we don’t interact face-to-face anymore, we will forget how to do it – or, as is the case with many younger people in Western culture right now – we may never learn it at all. To put it simply, if your social life revolves around a phone screen and an online profile, you will struggle to transfer those skills to real-life, face-to-face contact. There is no comment section in real life.
The truth is that you don’t need social media. There is nothing about it that life requires. I can tell you firsthand that my life continued on without missing a beat after I deleted my Facebook account. In some cases, it was months before some of the people I know – people who were close to me – reached out and asked why I wasn’t around online anymore. They didn’t even notice at first. And I felt relief in knowing that I didn’t know exactly what was happening with everyone constantly. I had found peace in disconnecting, and only connecting to the things that I had right in front of me. Only the things that were worth my attention.
I noticed a change in myself after Facebook was gone. I started to be more self-aware. My confidence grew. I spent more time building skills I wanted to build and enjoying hobbies I wanted to enjoy. I started valuing the people in my life more deeply, even though I had few of them. I got in shape and ate better. I grew more empathetic and expended effort on other people in listening to their stories and challenges. I even greeted people I met in public differently, making eye contact and smiling with my eyes. I made an effort to not check my phone and didn’t let it run my life. I changed in a lot of great ways in part because I was no longer chained to the court of public opinion.
To this day, my phone is on silent vibrate mode 24/7. I check it when I check it. The intentional shift away from social media and screen time changed the things I concentrated on, allowing me to change my life and my career.
I know it’s hard, but you should try it. Put down the phone. Go outside and play. See what connecting for real does for you.
Man. Beard. Food. 
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