The False Abundance of Social Media.

Well, of course this was going to be the first post for me. 

I used to be on Facebook. Many, MANY of you still are. And that’s cool. I would still be on Facebook if I had a choice. A lot of people were starting to do the “I’m ditching Facebook and going to BlueSky” or whatever service thing. Well, I've apparently left as well, and possibly for good. Whatever the case, I'm starting this blog. 

As many of you know, I’m hopefully on my way to becoming a #cancersurvivor. <eyeroll… yawn> I was diagnosed with liver cancer after it being accidentally found during a lung scan while working at Scouts BSA camp. Early-August is when I was told of the mass on my liver and I eventually found out it was MASSIVE. Long story short, my wife and I went through all of the shit. The formal diagnosis, the doctors, the oncologist, the interventional radiologist. The tumor was shrunk from massive to just big (1/2 its original size) through the use of immunotherapy, which was incredible in its results, but I had to discontinue after two out of nine planned infusions. A week ago, I was given Y-90 radiation treatment, and my oncologist is pretty hopeful that it’s going to have a very positive effect.

The oncologist said that the tumor that I had in my belly could have been growing for 1 1/2-2 years. No wonder I felt like crap. It wasn’t the grief of my dad dying, nor the potential loss of a job. Also, it wasn’t the stress of an abusive co-worker. It also wasn’t my obstructive sleep apnea. Ok, that one probably contributed to my lack of energy. But suffice it to say, I had a reason for my exhaustion.

But now, my body is basically working the way it’s supposed to, rather than all of the weirdness that I had gradually learned was the new normal. Weird, that.

So I went from “will I die soon?” to “what do I do now that I’m likely NOT dying soon?” Full recovery is still not in the rear-view mirror, but it’s weird to plan for the future.

But we don’t live fully in the present, the future or the past, do we? An old saw that we fall back on was, as quoted by Joni Mitchell, “don’t it always seem to go that we don’t what we’ve got ’til it’s gone…” I’m leaving out the paving paradise and putting up a parking lot portion to make a broader point. I am one of the many people alluded to above who have been stripped of his or her Facebook account because of an arbitrary AI algorithm which doesn’t understand humor or nuance in the slightest. Much of the joking which has come with my cancer diagnosis have gone to some dark (or weird) places. As a rule, I feel that if you can’t laugh while you’re living, you’re dying. And if you can’t laugh while you’re dying, you aren’t really living. So laughter and telling jokes has become a way of coping during these trials.

So when you’re about to go under the knife, as it were, for radiation implantation, don’t make a joke online that you’re about to be shot up with what is an illicit substance. Absolutely don’t spell it out properly and whatever you do, don’t laugh at your situation when trigger happy algorithms think that you’re actually advocating self-abuse.

Yeah, I’m still pretty steamed about that. Why? Because this “cancer thing” has caused me to write more and better than I have in my life. The outlet WAS Facebook. My hope was that I could personalize my experience and maybe provide a different roadmap to navigate this shit. I lost all of those writings, and, frankly, a lot of memories that I could draw from for many years hence.

I mean, honestly, many of them were pretty banal. But still. That being stripped away was a lot like a house fire which destroys your possessions, keepsakes, photos, et al.

All presumably because AI has an inability to be discerning.

Many of the people I have been in contact with for YEARS are now very hard to contact. Unless I texted them or had an email, I’m pretty much SOL.

Which gets to the title of the piece. “The False Abundance of Social Media.” The contacts of all of my Facebook “friends” have been disappeared, like a political prisoner in a third world (well, now a first world but we’re not going to get into that here) country. But these friends were people that I kept in very loose connection with. This is a hard pill to swallow, but I think that I, like a lot of people, see the majority Facebook friends more as potential, rather than actual. Potential hangs, potential house sitters, potential people to actually connect with rather than the superficial level that social media fosters.

The depth of real friendship on social media is truly lacking.

Have you found this to be the case? You see someone in person that you’ve been friends with on social media for a while. They start talking about something that they’ve done recently, and you say something like “yeah, I saw that on Facebook.” It almost instantly shuts down the conversation.

I hate being that person, yet I do it.

Well, not anymore. I won’t have the opportunity to have learned the basic outline of your life via a service. We’ll just have get together.

I certainly hope I find you, or you find me.