why I quit Facebook (and should quit the Internet, period)

Civilization is what makes you sick.

— Paul Gauguin

It's been three weeks to the day since I went dark. "Dark" is something of a misnomer; I haven't quit the Internet entirely. Facebook accounted for, at best, 10-15% of my total time surfing the web. It's fair to say, however, that it was the main reason for my being on the web in the first place, if you know what I mean.

Some of my friends have only just discovered that I'm gone. I've received text messages and e-mails asking me what's up and when I might be coming back. I have no definite answer to give, because honestly, I'm not sure myself.

The answer is "When I'm ready."

But why did I quit in the first place? I've been wrestling with this question for nigh on a week. As of this morning, I was still at a loss.

Then, this afternoon, I went down to the Han River to read. I took a folding chair, my new Stanwell pipe, a plentiful supply of tobacco and matches, a bottle of Jim Beam and a copy of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. The air was crisp. The sun was sinking behind feathery clouds. The trees were dripping with reds and yellows. The river was iron-grey and lay at rest like a freshly-tempered sword. I unfolded the chair, lit up my pipe, filled a glass with bourbon, opened the book, and read the final four chapters in one go.

Upon finishing, I felt that I'd reached new levels of clarity in my search for answers.

Civilization.

That's the problem.

Civilization.

I've been staring the matter in the face this whole time and never recognized it. The problem of civilization is a central theme in Brave New World, just as it is in my own novel series (the third installment of which I'm writing for NaNoWriMo).

What do I mean by "the problem of civilization"? Bread and circuses. Mustapha Mond, the Resident World Controller of Western Europe (and the closest thing to a villain that Brave New World has) explains it thus: you can't have a civilization full of intelligent, independent people, or it will dissolve into chaos. There'll be differences of opinion, boredom, ennui, insanity, or outright war. Hence the system of control which is so thoroughly explained in the beginning of the novel: the intelligence, physical beauty, and usefulness (or lack thereof) of any particular human being is determined at the embryonic stage, and a series of clinical processes are enacted to ensure that the resultant human being is molded and shaped to be a cog in the machinery of civilization. Menial tasks are performed by big, dumb, ugly people who've been chemically and genetically altered in their test tubes and then conditioned in childhood to accept their lot and perform their tasks with joy. Administrative duties are performed by handsomer, prettier, smarter, and wiser human beings, whose development and conditioning were likewise controlled from the get-go. To counter any malaise or dissatisfaction, humans are encouraged to imbibe soma, an ecstasy-inducing drug; have as many dalliances as they like, with no strings attached; watch "feelies," tactile versions of movies; and play ridiculous sports like Obstacle Golf. With their minds mired in pointless pursuits and carnal pleasures, and their days filled with the drudgery they've been preconditioned to enjoy, human beings have no need to ever worry about things like war or civil strife. Anyone who shows "subversive" or "devious" preferences for solitude, monogamy, or sobriety is sent to an island, severed from the main population to preserve the public's general state of contentment. Only in remote places such as Western America, on the so-called "Savage Reservations" (vast tracts of land surrounded by electrified fences) is humanity's inherent barbarity allowed to continue: religion, viviparous birth, marriage, love, and natural aging.

Fascinating book. You should read it. Mightily depressing, though.

Why? Because it's coming true. I look around now and I see the same thing that John the Savage sees when he leaves his Reservation and comes to London: thanks to drugs like the Internet, amusing diversions like video games and smartphones, and Facebook—that saccharine filter of friendship and raw experience—we have a civilization more blinded to the ebb and flow of reality than ever before. I see people more concerned with emoticons, abbreviations, Bubble Crush, Angry Birds, KakaoTalk, YouTube, Twitter, news feeds, discussion forums, and torrent downloads than they are with a lavender autumn sky.

That's the way I saw myself heading. And I didn't like it.

When I originally quit Facebook, I told myself I was doing it because my right hand was moving of its own accord—creeping, crawling toward that Facebook tab, clicking on the bookmark unbidden. I also felt that my brain's natural tendency towards autodidactism had been superseded by a base craving for input: information of any stamp, no matter how sordid or simplistic. I perceived that I was logging onto Facebook every morning for two vile reasons, and those reasons alone:

(1) to peer at the winnowed grains of my friends' (and coworkers', and distant acquaintances', and too-distant relatives') lives and assess them subjectively; and

(2) to make myself angry. I'd foolishly become involved with ("liked") a slew of conservative political Facebook groups, and my news feed teemed with their inflammatory rhetoric on a daily basis.

I was fed up. I felt like Facebook wasn't much good for communicating with or keeping track of loved ones anymore; now it was just a place for my friends to post insufferable political views, hackneyed jokes, fatuous memes, mushy musings on pets or spouses or babies, and pictures of cats. I felt like I wasn't really contributing anything to Facebook anymore; I realized that I was reposting quotations and news stories basically in order to annoy my liberal friends. I had degraded. I was no longer an intellectual, upstanding member of the online community. I was little more than a troll. Enough was enough. When I woke up and saw that Facebook was making me miserable, that my hand would relentlessly click on the link and prevent me from accomplishing anything worthwhile, and that I was spending nearly six hours of my day—all of my free time—just staring at screens, it became clear that I was a full-blown Facebook addict. 

I didn't feel like I was really living.

You'll notice that "living" is one of the tags I use for posts. You'll find it in the tag cloud over on the right side of this blog's webpage. (Even using the term "tag cloud" makes me want to puke.) I did that intentionally. I want to highlight the posts that are actually about Life, life with a capital L, not life through a fiber-optic cable. I want to keep track of how much living I'm doing. I want to feel like the two hundred hours Steam so thoughtfully tells me I've spent playing RAGE have been counterbalanced by at least a thousand hours of pure-D experience. 

Facebook wasn't letting me do that, and I knew it. I've known it from the beginning. I mentioned something in my original post about wanting to accomplish more during the hiatus, such as touring Gyeonggi-do, riding trains, visiting Hwaseong Fortress, exploring Ganghwa Island and so forth.

I don't know why I got so wrapped up in Facebook and the Internet at large. I can't explain why it's so easy for the human brain to fall prey to instant communication, electronic entertainment, and easy access to moving and static images. But that's what happened to me. Maybe it's a byproduct of civilization. We're social animals, and we've been conditioned to be even more social by our millennia-long habit of living in cities. We want to feel connected. Perhaps it also has something to do with the way our brains our wired. After an eternity of playing with things like marbles and Jacob's ladders, video games and streaming video are a quantum leap forward. (Whatever the reason, the effects are insidious.)

I just want to feel alive. I believe that civilization, and with it technology and all its insidious tendrils, is sapping the genuineness and joie de vivre from the existential equation. I was on Facebook for the sake of keeping my brain entertained during its downtime, like a kid with a Game Boy in a waiting room. And I wasn't even using my time on Facebook in a constructive way (as far as it's possible to use one's time on Facebook in a constructive way, anyway): I was just trolling. If it wasn't Facebook, it was something else: editing pages on TV Tropes, looking up trivia on the Internet Movie Database, watching Grand Theft Auto V videos on YouTube, researching firearms on Wikipedia, even browsing news sites with the same ulcerating anger with which I once patrolled my Facebook feed. Technology, man. The Internet. It's eating my life. I'm 13,000 words into my NaNoWriMo project, and I can ill afford to be wasting time wholesale—now or ever. 

So I quit Facebook. And I might just quit the Internet, too, at least until November's over. We'll have to see. Something's gotta give. Civilization's making me sick, especially now that I've finished Brave New World. I read about soma, and feelies, and sex-hormone chewing gum, and Obstacle Golf and Centrifugal Bumble-puppy and Assistant Predestinators and bottles and television and I thought, Man.

No way. Not for me.

As the Savage defiantly tells Mustapha Mond, "I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want goodness. I want sin."

Living, in other words. Not virtual reality.

If you agree with me, then get off my blog and go eat an apple in the autumn air. You'll thank me later.