rejuvenation

thoughts on death and a brief history of my time on facebook

I went to a funeral the other day. I’ve been to a few funerals this year.

Lately I have been feeling confronted by how fucked my career is. I have been learning Go and deepening my knowledge of PowerShell, but I am sickeningly weak in every area that matters for the jobs I want to get. The fortune I predicted has come to pass, and I have let many of my skills stagnate and die, I have failed to improve myself professionally while at P&G, and I am faced now with the option of either staying at P&G indefinitely or moving into IT management. I could, I believe, re-learn the things that I once knew, advance my knowledge in the areas where I am weakest, and then find a job that uses those skills. But in order to do that I would need to draw a massive amount of motivation from a font which runs dry. I feel hopeless about it and I spend my days fantasizing about smoking a joint and listening to music while looking at nice views. Some days that's exactly what I get to do, and on those days I find myself thinking about my death.

I look at things related to programming regularly. The other day I read a post from Richard Stallman about "how i do my computing" and at one point he said (paraphrasing) that if you wish to learn programming you should read a programming book and see if you take to it. If you don't take to it, then you should go do other things because you shouldn't waste your time doing things you're not inclined towards. I've been thinking about that a lot. I don't think I'm much inclined towards anything, and certainly not programming. Stallman is a loser so who cares what he has to say, but I can't help feeling like he's right that I should probably be doing something else. Most of the time I see things related to programming it sparks nothing in me except dread, no curiosity, no interest, no care at all, just a feeling that I am far behind and falling further into ignorance.

I haven't been bowling in a few weeks. I find myself less interested in going bowling due to how awful bowling alleys are. The vibes are atrocious. Basically every time I go I am surrounded by families that have such rotten dynamics I find it difficult to focus on anything but the abuse I'm witnessing. This is combined with the disgusting nature of these places, the loud and terrible music, the cost (small but relevant), and the lighting. The activity itself is wonderful but the alleys are absolutely dreadful. I think if I was a member of a bowling league and I was bowling regularly with others that I knew it would be a different story, but I have no interest in a bowling league, so I am going to take a break for a bit. Maybe there's a way to make it work but for now I am going to focus on riding my bike.

During the funeral I was wondering about my family: who would die first? My father is most likely. He's the oldest, he's tall, he lets strangers sleep in his house about 10 days a month. Since my grandparents started dying I've been thinking that my family is in "the era of death." That is, now that death has "started" for my immediate family, it won't stop. The funerals will keep coming and they won't stop coming and then I’ll be the one in the casket and the deaths will continue. I wonder which of my parent's children will die first. I wonder what I'll say at their funeral, assuming it's not me. I wonder how I'll go on with any of them gone. I often feel like I won't, that the death of any of my siblings, or of Leah, will be simply too much for me and I will end my life. But I know, I think, that this is not true. That I'll be fine, that I'll continue walking on my knees through the desert repenting, that I'll love whoever is left to love and then I'll die by some other means: a car crash or a poisoning or some other more subtle way, like choking to death on my own saliva in the kitchen.

I reached a new personal best ELO on chess.com bullet: 1892. I feel pretty good about that. I lost a bunch of games after that and I’ve been hanging out around the 1820~ mark for a week or so. I ought to expand my opening repertoire. Every game I force the accelerated london as white and play some disgusting g3 bg2 nonsense as black. It’s not cute but it’s been generally effective.

I’m off Facebook now, probably for good. I haven’t deleted my accounts and I likely won’t, but I don’t browse there anymore. I wrote a script to close the tab if I go on Facebook and I let it run continuously in the background in case I go on Facebook through force of habit. It’s weird, not going on Facebook.

I first started using Facebook when I was 13 or 14 years old. A friend from church told me about it and I made an account and added my friends. I remember thinking that I wanted to take my account creation seriously, unlike how I had treated making a MySpace, so I diligently answered every question, filled out every prompt, took new pictures of myself for my profile picture, and then added the people I knew. Facebook quickly became a place of deepening social bonds, we played games in Notes and by tagging each other in pictures, we planned events, and we messaged each other constantly.

Soon after this period I made many friends through Tumblr, and eventually some of them became my Facebook friends. My posts were often targeted to them.

I went to high school sometime later and continued using Facebook. I added many of my classmates and people who I went to school with were often surprised at my presence on Facebook: I dressed differently, I talked differently, I made different jokes. Facebook revealed a portion of myself that had previously been private, and this changed the way many people at my high school viewed me, usually in a positive manner. I hated the people at my high school for the most part, so when I graduated I deleted 400~ classmates from Facebook and made a post saying “the best part of graduating is getting to delete everyone from high school,” which I thought was pretty funny.

In the interim period before going to college, I went to Europe for a month. I spent two weeks with my brother Jacob and then two weeks alone. I brought a small digital point and shoot camera and took about 3,000 pictures, 2,000 of which were selfies. I posted about 800 of the pictures to Facebook in albums named after the country / city where the pictures were taken: Fuck France, Fuck Denmark, Fuck Hamburg, Fuck Italy, etc.

Right before my freshmen year I was added to two separate groups: ideas, and People That Aumm Sometimes And Are Also Ooohh. “ideas” was a group for posting ideas. They were funny ideas, like “one of those hats with a spinny thing on top but the spinny thing is a hot dog” or sometimes they were more serious, like “replace the admin staff with people who aren’t bigots.” People That Aumm Sometimes (Aumm for short) was a group for posting image macros. It was filled with highly prolific artists putting out primarily low-effort image macros, but regularly people would post pieces that were incredibly well done. Often Aumms were funny, most of the time they were centered around suicide. I made a bunch of aumms became friends with many of the regulars there, including a few people that I am still good friends with.

Through these two groups (and a few others) a new paradigm for using Facebook was born. This paradigm was primarily two things:

1. Facebook groups as open-ended prompts for art and humor

2. Loose communities forming across groups which had many overlapping users

A few other notable groups sprung up: ebaes, baeby teeth, posibaes, Cool Freaks’ Wikipedia Club, New Urbanist Memes For Transit Oriented Teens, Malaphors Are My Piece Of Cake, Post Aesthetics, Thunderdome 2.

The first 3 of these were the most formative in my years of using Facebook. These were groups for horny people (primarily women and nonbinary people) to post thirst traps. Facebook didn’t moderate content in groups at this time, so you could post nudes in these groups without any repercussions. I participated heavily in these groups by complimenting people and over time became close friends with many people in these groups.

I remember after maybe 4 months of posting in these groups I had gotten into a bunch of arguments with strangers. I was being pedantic and rude to people (as I often was at that point in my life) and these strangers were responding by making fun of me and insulting me. I posted in Aumm that I was struggling with this and a friend of mine, Lucas, responded and told me that being nice is the solution. He told me to stop thinking in terms of right and wrong, correct and incorrect, and to instead just focus on being nice to other people, and in particular, being nice to people who are nice. Lucas was a prolific Aumm poster who made a bunch of aumms that featured knights. Lucas eventually killed himself.

As I became more active in these groups, the communities in them began calling it “weird facebook,” in no small part due to the pseudo-community called on Twitter called “weird twitter” which primarily posted surreal jokes.

During the summer after my freshmen year of college, I became significantly more active in these groups. They lead directly to my interest in running a poetry club, which I started with my friend Scout, who was also part of these groups.

Memes were a large part of these groups, and many of the people in these groups began their own meme pages, such as Gangster Popeye, Lettuce Dog, Cabbage Cat, Sharks vape being gay and dragon ball.

I tried to reach the 5000 friend limit and tried to reach the page “Like” limit and tried to reach the “Group Membership” limit. I reached 5000 friends when a bunch of Egyptian teens decided to make profiles with alien profile pictures and add people in the US. I added all of them. I liked about 30,000 pages and joined 3,000 groups. At that point, Facebook was basically unusable. I saw nothing but posts from random pages, groups, and strangers.

Over time the groups began splintering. These groups were highly politicized: many “leftists” began demanding that groups take political stances, many fascists began mocking them for holding beliefs, and the Admins / Moderators of the groups took action one way or another. Groups like Aumm became less important for me, ideas was gone by this point, and new political groups like “Settler Colonial Ideas” came to the forefront of my Facebook usage. This group in particular was a group for communists to post screenshots of people espousing settler-colonial beliefs, either to mock them or to talk about them.

Other groups, like Seinfeld Shitposting, became fascist hotbeds. (Currently, 8-9 years later, Seinfeld Shitposting is named “Seinfeld ICE-Raidposting” and the big meme in the group is based around saying the N-word.)

As this splintering continued and sharpened, groups became less and less of a big deal. The people who liked each other had been Facebook friends for ages at this point, and posting statuses to talk directly to each other was becoming more popular.

In 2020 I made a new Facebook and stopped using my original account entirely. I added about 300 people and became significantly closer with just about all of them. I posted more freely, I was part of fewer groups, I didn’t follow any meme pages, and I was active in a bunch of hobbyist pages. I didn’t post any poetry or make any image macros, I didn’t make any memes or add many strangers, I didn’t get into arguments.

Over the past couple years I’ve felt like it’s untenable to continue using Facebook. I know that Mark Zuckerberg is evil, that Facebook as a corporation is evil, that it contributes to untold horrors throughout the world. I know that the relationships I’ve built there, while real and meaningful, provide me with less fulfillment and satisfaction than relationships with people I know in real life. I know that Facebook, despite my plethora of ad-blockers and privacy-enhancers, continually shows me ads, harvests my data, and presents me with things that I would rather not see. All of this knowledge points not just to the obvious fact that I would be better off by not using this platform, but to the moral requirement of disengaging from this company, as I have done with companies like Microsoft and McDonald’s and Starbucks and Amazon.

So I’m off Facebook. It feels terrible. I don’t have many friends in real life. I have often cried to Leah about how Facebook is my primary source of socialization and friendship, news acquisition, recommendations, advice, comfort, rationalization, insight, resources, humor, and companionship. Cutting off these relationships is odd and discomforting. I feel struck by how all of these people who I have known and spoken to for years will continue to live their lives, and continue to be friends with each other, but I will simply miss it, I won’t be part of it, it will all pass me by. In this way, it’s like a death. A few people have reached out to stay in touch via other means. Hopefully we do continue to stay in touch. I can’t help but be skeptical. A large aspect of what makes Facebook good is that it allows you to passively stay up to date on people: if they post a status or a picture, or if they comment on a mutual’s post, you can see it without them even intending for you to see it. This is in contrast to 1 on 1 relationships in which you must actively seek out your friends for updates, or they must actively seek to update you specifically, else it will pass by unknown.

There’s a Florist song called “Started to Glow” in which they sing

I dreamt about flying again
The air felt warm I looked down at the trees

Everything I have wanted to say came out
I love you, oh my god we fucked up

That’s very much how I feel about everyone I’ve ever known through Facebook and our time there generally: I love you, oh my god we fucked up.

Here’s a playlist of jazz tracks from the 60s and 70s, primarily taken from albums featured in the book Independent Black Jazz Of America by Ken Tsukamoto & Yusuke Ogawa. This is one of the longer playlists I’ve posted here, but it’s worth it if you put in the time. Each of these albums is worth listening to in their own right. If you have the ability and time, get copies of the albums featured in the book and give them a listen. There’s not a bad pick in there.

youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4bUgvWbrZGILLV3gNqpeLZ4EbwvsZgdZ

proton: https://drive.proton.me/urls/H1QKJP5EH4#9WsJv8tDSEVv

1. Mixed Bag - La Margarita

2. David Durrah - Venus Fly Trap

3. Eddie Gale - A Walk with Thee

4. Gene Russell - You Are the Sunshine of My Life

5. Calvin Keys - Efflugence

6. Henry Grimes Trio - Walk On

7. Jazz Symphonics - Athena

8. Joseph Jarman - Little Fox Run

9. The Jihad - Madness

10. Sonny Murray - Black Art

11. Leon Thomas - Malcolm's Gone

12. Noah Howard - Homage To Coltrane

13. Anthony Braxton - To Pianist Cecil Taylor

14. Rudolph Johnson - The Highest Pleasure

15. Sun Ra - Medicine for a Nightmare

16. Horace Tapscott Quintet - For Fats

17. Max Roach - Effi