In 2008 I was doing power yoga in my office while listening to Leo Laporte, The Tech Guy, on KFI 640. In the middle of discussing routers, spyware, and the eternal misery of Windows Vista, he casually remarked, “This Facebook thing is a big deal.”
I had no idea what he meant.
I wasn’t the sort of person who chased the latest technological revolution. I listened to Leo for a different reason. I loved hearing retirees call in with computers so old they belonged in an archaeological dig. They would ask whether they should keep a desktop that required thirty minutes to boot, wheezed like an emphysema patient opening Microsoft Word, and treated email as an Olympic event, or whether it was finally time to buy “one of these new computers.”
Facebook barely registered on my radar.
Then, in the summer of 2009, my wife was pregnant with our twin daughters. It occurred to me that Facebook might be a convenient way to share photos and updates with family and friends. So I created an account.
Within weeks my friend list exploded like mushrooms after a rainstorm.
I was enchanted.
Perhaps this was the medium I had been waiting for all my life.
Unfortunately, Facebook did not merely connect me to other people. It connected me to the most embarrassing parts of myself. My ego, which until then had lived quietly in the basement, burst upstairs carrying champagne.
People would discover me.
I would become famous.
How many friends could I accumulate?
How many likes?
How many followers?
Would humanity finally recognize my genius now that history had invented the proper delivery system?
The intoxication was exquisite.
That was seventeen years ago.
Looking back, my relationship with Facebook has all the emotional contours of a failed marriage. There was the honeymoon, the infatuation, the passionate commitment, the slow accumulation of grievances, the disappointment, the resentment, and now something even colder than resentment.
Contempt.
Or perhaps futility.
The old expression comes to mind: You can’t squeeze blood from a turnip.
Another comes from the Book of Acts, where the risen Christ asks Saul, “Why are you kicking against the goads?” Stop exhausting yourself fighting reality.
That is how social media feels now.
Not tragic.
Pointless.
Because the marriage was built on lies.
The lies sounded persuasive enough.
Metrics measure significance.
Engagement proves value.
Visibility creates influence.
Influence creates meaning.
If enough strangers notice you, your life has somehow become larger.
It took me years to realize that every one of those propositions was counterfeit.
The pursuit of attention slowly teaches us to manipulate others.
Eventually it teaches us to manipulate ourselves.
The more desperately we chase attention, the more anxious we become.
The anxiety metastasizes into resentment.
Soon we are no longer expressing ourselves.
We are auditioning for an algorithm.
Attention capture is not meaning.
Attention capture is not love.
Attention capture is not flourishing.
One can dominate the internet and still become another version of Gollum, clutching a glowing ring instead of a precious one.
A few days ago I watched a fitness YouTuber whose work I normally admire upload one of those interchangeable “What I Eat in a Day” videos. He microwaved leftovers. He poured cereal into a bowl. He assembled a few perfectly ordinary meals to reassure viewers that he was just like them.
The video felt less like communication than contractual obligation.
He looked exhausted.
Not physically.
Spiritually.
As though the algorithm had shown up at his front door demanding another sacrifice.
I watched perhaps thirty seconds before closing the window.
I did it for his dignity.
And for mine.
Now I don’t know what to do with Facebook, Instagram, or my fifteen-year-old YouTube channel.
They feel less like hobbies than reminders of a marriage that should have ended years ago.
I still write on my blog.
Almost nobody reads it.
Wonderful.
Obscurity has become strangely liberating.
I write what genuinely interests me instead of what might seduce an algorithm into distributing me like digital fertilizer across the internet. I no longer feel compelled to manufacture outrage, optimize thumbnails, or package my thoughts into bite-sized dopamine pellets.
The work belongs to me again.
People often wonder what comes after divorce.
The honest answer is that nobody knows.
You spend a long time discovering who you are after years spent becoming someone else.
I suspect millions of us are undergoing that same process with social media.
We experienced the honeymoon.
We believed the promises.
We invested our identities.
We discovered the betrayal.
Now we are wandering through the emotional wreckage trying to remember who we were before engagement statistics became a measure of our worth.
We are all, in one way or another, losing our religion.
R.E.M. accidentally wrote the soundtrack for the algorithmic age.
I have become convinced that social media has diminished us personally, culturally, politically, and spiritually. It rewarded vanity, monetized outrage, industrialized narcissism, and trained us to confuse visibility with virtue.
But I have also become convinced that this era is ending.
People are tiring of the performance.
The masks have grown heavy.
The applause no longer sounds convincing.
Something new is approaching.
Whether it will be better or merely different, I cannot say.
I only know that the old marriage is over.
And, for the first time in years, that feels less like a loss than a beginning.
Cinemorphosis 
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