Everything Must Go

Almost.

I spent last month in the depths of my Facebook page. In an effort to slash some of the evil tech billionaire bloat from my life, I wanted to delete it permanently, but conveniently for the powers that be, it’s entangled in a couple of business accounts I need to manage for work. So I decided I would keep the page, but wipe it clean as best I could and discontinue any personal use.

Because Facebook does not offer you a way to delete multiple posts or photos at once¹, I deleted years of posts one by one, which will really humble a woman. Not only did I see every 15-year-old photo and silly meme shared by people I no longer speak to, friends who are no longer around, people who have died, but I also realized just how much I have shared about myself. How many bone-headed teenage opinions or cryptic, moody posts of mine were plastered on this page for anyone to find. How much of my most treasured relationships were lived or recorded, at least in part, digitally.

In the past, I’ve thought of every social media account as a kind of scrapbook, and Facebook was no exception. I’ve been on that website since I was 15, and the sheer volume of my life that it’s recorded since then is staggering, even if I didn’t use it nearly as much the older I got. Until recently, I’ve treasured that.

I have loved when Facebook memories reminded me of my homecoming pictures, of a breakfast I ate with friends when I was 16, of the Rocky Horror Picture Show outfit I chose junior year of college. I didn’t wipe pictures of my ex after our relationship ended. I let full photo albums from vacations I took with a friend I don’t speak to anymore remain on my page. When I started to routinely cull my friends list every year or so, I left the profiles of people who were no longer alive untouched. I didn’t purposefully revisit these things more than a handful of times, but there was a strange comfort in knowing they were there. That I had a record of happy times with these people even if they didn’t last forever.

Of course, keeping these things is a double-edged sword — I’m often too nostalgic and sentimental for my own good. My hands certainly aren’t clean in relationships gone sour. I know that lurking among the snippets of good times are reminders of my own childishness, coldness, and immaturity. And the Facebook memories function obviously doesn’t just send fun homecoming pictures to the top of my feed — it also sends moments I find horribly embarrassing, obituaries I shared, photos that make me sad. How much longer did it take me — does it still take me — to come to terms with aspects of the past when a website is shooting slices of those times to the top of my feed every day? And why does a third party corporation not only own these records, but decide when I should be reminded of them?

Those of us born in the mid-90s, give or take a year or so in either direction, experienced our youth at a strange time. I remember the sounds of dial-up, of my mom yelling at me to get off the internet so she could use the landline. I remember when the cellular plan for my cheap flip phone only allowed 200 texts each month and the only game it had was a deeply pixelated version of Diner Dash. I remember carrying a beat up CD player as a kid, and then a clunky MP3 player, long before an iPod came along.

But then a perfect storm of adolescence and technological innovation coalesced.

At 12, talking to friends through a laggy MySpace connection felt a gift from the space age. By high school, I had an iPhone. At 15, I began a seven-year relationship via AIM instant messages. By 17, I was exchanging Snapchats. By 19, my college classmates were sending anonymous gossip to an app that broadcast the juicy details across campus for all to see. By 22, I had graduated from a journalism school where I learned that it was essential to leverage Twitter to support my personal brand, that comment sections were a necessary evil. By 25, the internet was my main connection to the outside world during a global pandemic, crystal clear footage of protests and police brutality and TikTok recipes and body bags lining the streets and my friend’s new baby and attacks on the Capitol and a random aquaintance’s political opinions streaming endlessly in front of my face as I curled up for bed each night. By 28, I had started muting and unfriending people by the dozens, disillusioned and overwhelmed and starting to feel like this all happened too fast, that I didn’t think about any of it enough, that we were never really meant to be this connected to this many people.

And now at 30, I want to log off.

Not all the way off, I guess. I like Instagram, which I know is still owned by evil tech billionaires. But it feels smaller, more manageable, less chaotic. I made my account private, and I don’t scroll the Discover page or Reels. I just check in on my friends and have fun sharing photos. I’ve also disconnected my Instagram from my Facebook so that posts no longer auto-share to both platforms.

I like Pinterest. I like Substack. I’ve deleted Twitter/X. I’ve dabbled in BlueSky, but I don’t want another Twitter. Snapchat, which started to feel like a relic long ago, is now reserved mostly for fielding videos of a friends’ thrifting hauls. I still use TikTok for now, though it’s another platform I find ethically dubious, but my feed feels curated enough these days that I still find inspiration and creativity more than anything else.

I’m OK being online in some ways, but — maybe now that my brain is fully formed — I just want to be more thoughtful about it. I don’t want to share every experience I have. I don’t need everyone to know every tiny thought that takes up five seconds in my mind. I don’t want to be beholden to notifications, to knowledge of how many people did or didn’t like something I had to say. And I don’t want a reason to live with one foot in the past.

And so I’ve landed here, at the realization that if I want to detangle myself from the internet in any meaningful way, my digital hoarding has to end.

I’m mourning the scrapbook I told myself I was cultivating. I’m mourning the good memories that were swiftly, thoughtlessly, automatically stashed into digital corners to surprise me at random times years down the road. I feel like I’m setting fire to a box of notes, ticket stubs, documentation that I took for granted would always be there.

But it feels necessary. We weren’t meant to keep everything forever. I have what matters: a select few photos and screenshots I saved to my desktop, physical notes and mementos in a box under my bed. Maybe now I’ll fill a real scrapbook — one that lives entirely offline. Groundbreaking.

1. At least I don’t think there’s a way to do this, unless the photos are in an album. If there is, don’t tell me now, because it will send me into a dark mental place.