Many of you know that I've recently returned to social media after being away from it for several years. And no, it wasn't because I suddenly developed some overwhelming desire to know what everybody had for breakfast, see pictures of somebody's cat wearing a Halloween costume, or discover which of my former high school classmates has become an expert in constitutional law, epidemiology, international relations, and apparently every other fucking subject known to mankind.
I came back because I'm an author. And unfortunately, in this modern era, being an author involves considerably more than sitting at a keyboard, stringing words together, and hoping somebody eventually reads the shit you've written. You have to promote yourself. You have to promote your books, your blog, your articles, and whatever events you happen to be participating in. You have to build an audience, interact with readers, make connections with other writers, and generally remind the world that you exist. And like it or not, social media has become a necessary part of that process. So, after years of blissful absence, I reluctantly wandered back into the digital wilderness.
Facebook and Instagram.
Jesus fucking Christ. What a shit show.
Of course, being the brilliant fucking strategist that I am, I decided to rejoin Facebook during an election year. Because apparently I hadn't suffered enough in my life and thought it might be entertaining to subject myself to the collective political wisdom of several hundred million people who are absolutely, positively convinced that everybody else is a fucking idiot.
And it didn't take long to remember why I'd left in the first place.
The grandstanding. The condescension. The endless declarations of intellectual superiority. The people who apparently believe their Facebook profiles are extensions of the faculty lounge at Harvard, complete with demands for citations, peer-reviewed research, and properly formatted bibliographies before anybody is permitted to express a fucking opinion. Everybody's an expert. Everybody's a scholar. Everybody has a degree from the University of I Read Something on the Internet, and they're all absolutely delighted to explain why your understanding of the world is fundamentally flawed.
And God forbid you express a political opinion that doesn't conform to the prevailing orthodoxy of whichever little ideological congregation you've wandered into. Suddenly you're not having a conversation. You're defending a dissertation before a committee of self-appointed academics who seem to believe that the ability to type "source?" beneath somebody's Facebook post constitutes a meaningful contribution to human knowledge.
Now, before anybody gets their panties in a fucking wad, let me clarify something. I'm not suggesting that facts don't matter. Of course they fucking matter. I'm suggesting that there's a difference between having an actual conversation about an issue and using the language of academic rigor as a convenient little club with which to beat anybody who doesn't agree with you. And I've noticed that some people are considerably more interested in demonstrating their intellectual superiority than they are in understanding what another human being is actually trying to say.
And in my recent experience, the political left has become particularly fucking accomplished at this.
Oops. There I go, picking on one side of American politics again.
Well, fuck it. I'm going to say it anyway.
The left is the fucking worst at this particular brand of self-righteous grandstanding.
Now, before anybody starts preparing their rebuttal, allow me to remind you that I despise both major political parties. I have no particular affection for Democrats, and I certainly don't have any for Republicans. As far as I'm concerned, both parties have spent generations constructing an increasingly complicated system of laws, regulations, taxes, exemptions, subsidies, and political favors designed to keep themselves in power while extracting as much money as possible from the American people. They fight in public, raise money off the outrage, and somehow manage to maintain a system in which ordinary citizens keep paying the bills while the political establishment keeps collecting the benefits. It's a beautiful fucking arrangement, provided you're one of the people benefiting from it.
But I'm talking about something slightly different here. I'm talking about the people who identify with these political movements, and particularly the way they interact with people who don't share their beliefs. And in my own experience, which is admittedly not a scientific study conducted by seventeen researchers with a federal grant and a fucking clipboard, I've found that some of the most intolerant people I've encountered are the very people who spend the most time proclaiming their commitment to tolerance.
There's a delicious irony in that, don't you think?
I've known plenty of conservatives who disagree with me about all sorts of things. Religion, abortion, gender identity, taxation, government spending, you name it. And yet, in many cases, we've managed to have perfectly civil conversations about those disagreements. Sometimes we even laugh about them. We recognize that we're different people with different experiences, different priorities, and different ways of looking at the world. We don't necessarily change each other's minds, but we can still sit down, have a beer, and enjoy one another's company.
And before somebody decides to interpret that as an endorsement of every conservative in America, let me save you the fucking trouble. I've encountered plenty of intolerant conservatives, too. Some of them are spectacular assholes. But the conservatives I've enjoyed talking with tend to approach liberty as something that includes the freedom to make choices they personally wouldn't make. That's a principle I can respect, even when we disagree about how consistently it should be applied.
What I've found increasingly exhausting about certain corners of the political left is the apparent belief that tolerance is something you extend only to people who have already arrived at the correct conclusions. If you disagree, you're not merely mistaken. You're ignorant. You're uninformed. You're morally deficient. You haven't done the research. You haven't examined the evidence. You haven't sufficiently educated yourself. And if you happen to belong to a demographic group that the political left considers part of its natural constituency, well, then your disagreement becomes an even greater offense.
Because apparently thinking for yourself is a wonderful thing, right up until you come to the wrong fucking conclusion.
And then comes the grandstanding. The lectures. The demands that you answer some carefully constructed question with a simple yes or no, as though the entirety of your political philosophy can be reduced to whether you approve of some obscure personnel decision made by the president of the United States. And if you decline to participate in the little interrogation, well, congratulations. You're avoiding the question. You're deflecting. You're refusing to engage in meaningful dialogue.
No, asshole. Sometimes I'm just refusing to participate in your fucking performance.
And that's what so much of social media has become, hasn't it? A performance. A never-ending parade of people demonstrating their moral virtue, intellectual sophistication, political awareness, and general superiority to everybody unfortunate enough to disagree with them. The audience applauds, the opposing team boos, and everybody goes home convinced they've made an important contribution to the future of civilization.
Meanwhile, absolutely fucking nothing has been accomplished.
But here's where the whole thing starts to get really interesting to me, because I think there's something considerably bigger going on than political arguments on Facebook.
Think about what social media was originally supposed to do. It was supposed to connect us. It was supposed to make the world smaller, bring distant friends and family closer together, and give us opportunities to interact with people we might otherwise never meet. And in some respects, it has done exactly that. I can share something I've written with somebody on the other side of the country in a matter of seconds. I can reconnect with an old friend I haven't seen in twenty years. I can discover writers, musicians, artists, and thinkers whose work I might never have encountered otherwise. That's genuinely remarkable when you stop to think about it.
But somehow, in the process of becoming more connected than any generation in human history, we've managed to become astonishingly fucking disconnected from one another.
And I don't mean technologically disconnected. Quite the opposite. We're connected all the goddamned time. We've got phones in our pockets, computers on our desks, tablets on our nightstands, and watches that can apparently tell us when we're stressed, which seems a little unnecessary given that the fucking watch is probably contributing to the problem. We can communicate with virtually anybody, anywhere, at any moment. We have access to more information, more opinions, more perspectives, and more opportunities for interaction than our grandparents could have imagined.
And yet, I sometimes wonder whether we actually know one another any better.
When I was growing up, people spent time together. Actual time. In the same physical space. We had people over to the house, or we went over to somebody else's house. Somebody put on a pot of coffee, somebody brought something to eat, and everybody sat around bullshitting about whatever happened to be going on in their lives. Sometimes we played cards. Sometimes Monopoly or Yahtzee. Sometimes we just sat around the kitchen table talking until somebody noticed it was getting late and decided they ought to head home.
And those conversations weren't always profound. Hell, most of them weren't. We talked about work, kids, neighbors, cars, the weather, and whatever ridiculous thing somebody had done that week. We complained about politicians, argued about sports, traded stories, and laughed at one another. Occasionally somebody got pissed off about something, but more often than not, somebody else made a joke, everybody laughed, and the conversation moved on.
We broke bread together.
And I think we've lost something important in the disappearance of that simple little ritual.
Because when you're sitting across the kitchen table from somebody, you're dealing with an actual human being. You can see their face. You can hear the inflection in their voice. You can recognize when they're joking, when they're frustrated, when they're genuinely upset, or when they're just being a sarcastic pain in the ass. You know something about their lives. You know their spouse, their kids, their struggles, their triumphs. You remember the time their car broke down or their mother got sick or they helped you move a refrigerator up three flights of stairs.
They're not just a collection of political opinions.
They're a person.
And that makes it a hell of a lot harder to reduce them to some convenient little ideological category.
But on social media? Fuck, that's easy.
You see somebody share an opinion you don't like, and suddenly you know everything you need to know about them. They're a liberal. They're MAGA. They're a socialist. They're a fascist. They're woke. They're a conspiracy theorist. They're an idiot. They're whatever convenient label allows you to dismiss them without having to consider that there might be an actual human being behind the fucking screen.
And the really remarkable thing is how eagerly we participate in it.
We seek out reasons to be offended. We look for opportunities to demonstrate that we're smarter, better informed, more compassionate, more patriotic, or more morally enlightened than somebody else. We collect likes and approving comments from people who already agree with us, and we interpret those little digital affirmations as evidence that we're winning something.
Winning what, exactly?
I haven't the faintest fucking idea.
It's almost as though we've managed to recreate high school on a global scale. The cliques, the popularity contests, the gossip, the public humiliation, the desperate need to belong to the right group and ridicule everybody outside it. Except now, instead of a few hundred teenagers wandering around a school building, we've got millions of grown adults engaging in the same ridiculous behavior from the comfort of their living rooms.
And somehow, we're supposed to consider this progress.
I wonder what historians will make of this period a couple hundred years from now. Assuming, of course, that we haven't managed to destroy civilization before anybody gets around to writing the history books.
Maybe they'll call it the Age of Connection. Or the Era of Digital Isolation. Or perhaps the Great Living Room Grandstanding Period, when human beings developed the technological ability to communicate instantly with virtually everybody on the planet and promptly used it to tell one another to fuck off.
Personally, I think that last one has a certain historical elegance to it.
And what's particularly strange is that I don't think most of us actually want to live this way. I think most people want connection. They want friendship. They want to feel understood. They want somebody to laugh with, somebody to share their accomplishments with, somebody who gives a shit when life gets difficult. They want the same basic human relationships people have wanted for thousands of years.
But we've built these extraordinary technological systems that make it incredibly easy to interact with one another without necessarily connecting with one another at all.
And those aren't the same fucking thing.
Interaction is clicking a button. Connection is knowing somebody.
Interaction is leaving a comment. Connection is caring whether the person you're commenting to is having a good day or a miserable one.
Interaction is winning an argument. Connection is being able to disagree with somebody and still want to sit across the table from them tomorrow morning.
Somewhere along the way, I think we've started confusing the first with the second.
And perhaps that's why returning to Facebook has been such a strange experience for me. I came back because I wanted to share my writing. I wanted to connect with readers, meet other authors, tell stories, and maybe build a little community around the things I create. And I've actually had some wonderful experiences doing exactly that. People have been supportive. They've encouraged me. They've read my work, shared my posts, and shown genuine interest in what I'm trying to accomplish.
But I've also been reminded just how quickly a platform designed to connect people can turn into a fucking arena where everybody's fighting for the last word.
And I'm beginning to think the last word might be the least valuable thing anybody wins.
Because here's what I keep coming back to. I don't need everybody to agree with me. I don't even particularly want everybody to agree with me. That would be boring as fuck. Some of the most interesting conversations I've ever had were with people whose perspectives were completely different from my own. People who challenged the way I thought about something, who introduced me to an experience I'd never considered, or who simply saw the world through a different set of eyes.
That's how we learn. That's how we grow. That's how we develop some understanding of people whose lives don't look anything like ours.
But you can't do that if every disagreement becomes a contest and every conversation becomes an opportunity to establish intellectual dominance.
And you certainly can't do it if you're more interested in proving somebody wrong than understanding what they're trying to tell you.
I don't know what the solution is. I'm not going to pretend I've got some brilliant plan for fixing social media, restoring civil discourse, or convincing millions of people to stop acting like self-righteous assholes on the internet. Hell, I occasionally act like a self-righteous asshole myself. I'm perfectly capable of recognizing that, even if it sometimes takes me a little longer than it probably should.
But I do know that I miss something about the way we used to spend time together. The unplanned visits. The coffee that turned into dinner. The card games that lasted until midnight. The conversations that wandered all over the fucking place without anybody keeping score. The simple pleasure of being around people without feeling obligated to agree with every opinion that came out of their mouths.
And I wonder whether we might all be a little happier if we spent less time trying to win arguments with people on the internet and a little more time sitting across the table from somebody who sees the world differently.
Maybe we could even play Yahtzee.
Although, knowing my luck, somebody would probably accuse me of manipulating the dice, demand that I cite a peer-reviewed study on probability, and insist that my refusal to answer a yes-or-no question about the legitimacy of my third roll constituted an admission of intellectual dishonesty.
And then I'd remember why I fucking hate Facebook.
But at least we'd be sitting at the same table.
And right about now, that sounds like a pretty good fucking start.
