Failed Reunion

Cancelled.  Not enough subscribers.

A few folks thought 55 years from high school graduation would make a good occasion to assemble once more.  An event, which I did not attend, took place in Florida five years earlier.  Fifty years often reflects a milestone for many things.  I attended my fiftieth college reunion with my wife, a member of the same class.  I hardly knew anyone in attendance, though a class of 1800 students studying programs that often did not intersect leaves friendships a mere fraction of the total.  Lecture classes of 150, a dorm of five dozen that changes each fall, and shared renewable activities with twenty not all graduating the same year leaves little enduring friendships.

High school created a much different exposure.  Our school buses ran the same neighborhood route for twelve years, mostly with the same neighbors.  The New York State Regents set class requirements that would keep us in the same English, Math, Shop, and Art classes for consecutive years.  Homerooms reflected the surname alphabet.  That remained constant.  Eventually, we would disperse by more stratified AP courses, math levels, and renewable extracurriculars, only to reassemble as a cohesive group on the school bus and homeroom each morning.  When reunions came, 15, 25, 30, 40, 50, you recognized everyone by name irrespective of the career paths and geographic destinies that we each had.  While I could drive to each, I attended with an overnight stay, others would fly significant distances and reserve hotel space at considerable expense.

#50 which materialized and #55 which did not required travel to Florida, home of the principal organizers and many others, perhaps outnumbering those who still lived in proximity to the school building we attended.  If a crossover point occurred, I think it #40.  That year, indeed a few months preceding our gathering, the Sunday NY Times, then more widely respected than it has since become, ran a feature on the growing popularity of Facebook.  Within weeks, many of us acquired accounts, invited classmates to become Facebook Friends, and updated with each other where our adult lives had taken us.  Familiarity generated curiosity.  I'd like to see my reacquainted Friends in person one more time.  The event, held a short drive from where we all once lived, attracted considerable attendance.  Nostalgia Meter measurements varied.  Curiosity about what became of the people I once knew seemed more pervasive.  In fact, at the event, I sat at a table with people I only knew tangentially as a teen, much like I gravitate to tables of strangers when I attend banquets professionally or for my Jewish community.  Mingling, though, at buffet or bar or hallway, directed my curiosity to the new FB Friends.  The organizers had engaged a professional firm to seek out our whereabouts, something done halfway well, and arrange the buffet, music, and event space.  

I had a decent time meeting people, but recognized myself as the outlier I was then.   It served me adequately my mostly productive adult years.  I drove to the area early to attend Sabbath services at a Conservative synagogue in the area the enduring successor to my Bar Mitzvah congregation.  That one, where many classmates also had Bnai Mitzvah, had closed due to membership attrition a few years earlier.  I was never into popular music or disco dance.  A hora or other Bar Mitzvah music with a dance circle would have added to my experience.  I was too timid to request this of the DJ.  My kosher diet, affirmed my last two years of high school, had me nibbling very selectively from the buffet.  But I had pleasant updates with many people.  It's the last I attended.

Fifty years arrived.  A usual landmark.  Many of us had retired.  A fair number had passed away before their three score and ten, which remained two years off.  Instead of hiring a consulting firm, the organizers, those people more memorable as cheerleaders than as analytical scholars, thought they could identify enough people through Facebook contacts.  They thought they could get better attendance in Florida than where we had attended school.  I asked a FB friend, an organizer of this, about his committee's budget.  They had no budget.  I took out my old graduation program and did an individual search for one column of names.  Google retrieved most of them.  When I suggested to an organizer that they divide the list and do this to identify whereabouts, I got a snarky reply that they didn't want my input.  And my intellect which very likely exceeds hers was not valued by that crowd then either.  They had an event, attendance list posted, far from representative of our 431 grads than it could have been.  Feedback from a real friend from Florida who attended.  She thought the In Memoriam list was the highlight.  I did not ask if they supplemented Rolling Stones and Beach Boys of our era with Bar Mitzvah music, also of that era if we had younger brothers.

Year 55 proposal came as a grassroots effort from a couple of women, now grandmothers, who thought we should relive old times once more.  Again Florida, as that's where the organizers live.  I briefly considered going.  The best flight would come from Avelo Airlines, the only commercial carrier from my nearest regional airport.  Good fare.  To keep it a good fare, they engaged in a more lucrative contract with ICE to deport captives to wherever the administration thinks they should be transported to.  Needless to say, I have misgivings about funding this, even if indirectly.  My personal deal breaker came later.  I asked an organizer about options for observing shabbos and kosher.  I got the platform version of shoulder shrug.  When I host guests, which I have, I default to inconveniencing myself to being helpful to them.  My guess is that Boca Raton has shuls and kosher sources of food for a weekend.  Others in my loop, which is not the organizer's loop then or now, opted out for a variety of reasons.  Insufficient down payments ended the project.

Might it have succeeded?  A FB Friend, one I was close to since Cub Scouts who succeeded grandly in several phases of his adult life, offered a FB suggestion that got traction from others.  He noted that while many if not most of us have migrated from our Rockland County origins, the incentive to return includes the environment along with the people of decades past.  I would also challenge the grassroots nature of the event.  High School divided us in a serious way.  We rode school buses with the same neighbors long before that.  Those on the bus route began to find our way, the paths to our adulthoods.  Some prioritized their grades and which college would accept them.  Others liked sports or music.  The two who joined the circus had their origins there.  Most were Jewish, at least on my bus route and classes, but we expressed this identity very differently.  A choral group had appeared on national TV.  Those members became another cohort.  Our class had ethnic minority representation and a geographic catchment that was less prosperous.  I did not see those kids at any of the reunions that I attended, though as I looked up people in my random list, at least one had achieved an honorable military career that took him around the world.  Every successful project needs a champion or two.  People imaging what they might like to pursue is an honorable undertaking.  They also need a committee that is representative of our class' composition.  An event created in an Echo Chamber, whether a reunion or too many of my synagogue happenings, performs less well than they could have, even if the organizers congratulate each other the day after.  We should know that by our senior years.  We've all had to make decisions on children's weddings, Christmas gatherings at work, whose input is needed to make a  committee sparkle.  Our disagreeable Uncle Loouie still gets invited.  The nebish at work gets escorted to the bar by the CEO at the holiday party.  That annoying INTJ who we can count on thinking of something nobody else can has a place on the committee.  Fifty years into our adult lives, that is how the most successful of us lived.  The classmate who cannot afford the reunion hotel at $160 a night can be found a guest room with a local empty nester for a night or two. I viewed the promotions on FB more as an event to be implemented than one of scattered relations or memories to be reassembled.

While this event did not materialize, we still have the people.  Facebook, which reconnected us in 2009, no longer serves that purpose effectively.  In its place, now as 70-somethings, we have fewer attachments despite the emergence of technology that once promised to expand that.  We no longer host bar mitzvahs and weddings to invite those friends from the past.  We do have more unassigned time and efficient transportation that has taken many, if not most of us, across the USA and beyond.  The organizers were too selective in who they tried to capture for what should have been a less selective net.  But our lifelong friends are not like that.  They are particular for a reason.  And we have the ability to keep those personal attachments afloat.

Friend Suggestions

When Facebook enticed us, for me 2009, it offered a chance to reconnect forty years after receiving our HS diplomas.  I promptly requested Friends with HS and Hebrew School acquaintances, a few folks from college, and but a handful of personal relatives and people from my town.  Most requests initiated by me were accepted, though girls who marginalized me in HS sometimes declined.  That list settled at about 100.  The algorithm has changed dramatically over the ensuing fifteen years, so maybe about ten of those hundred appear on my feed over a year, not counting birthday notices.  A few died along the way.  But Facebook's business model has clearly shifted from connecting old friends with each other to separating subscribers from a portion of their money, or maybe enraging them in some way.  No new Friend requests have come my way, and I've not offered to connect with anyone else.

Despite this, as I scroll through the messages that the algorithm concludes might keep me preferentially on their screens instead of Twitter's, I can expect to come across a banner of a couple dozen suggestions to initiate new Facebook friends a few times a day.  I scrolled through them.  No doubt, others get their banners with my picture, scrolling past without action, much as I do with my list.

If we have a lot of mutual friends, indicated under the photos, they are probably people from HS, as that is where my FB Friends derive.  If only one or two, which is most of them, they could be anyone's acquaintance or relative.  And many indicated no mutual Friends.  Occasionally a public figure appears.  My own posts early in the FB longevity, included occasional Likes, even verbal responses, from a few men of professional fame, though not recently.  Still, public figures pop up.  One recent one, a sleaze of political notoriety, listed a mutual friend.  She shares that man's political opinions, but I can attest that she is not personally deplorable.  

FB gives the viewer the option of deleting suggested people so that they do not reappear as suggestions, and hopefully my photo gets blocked from their suggested people.  This public blight was one of the few that got my deep six.  He's not appeared since.  There are a few others along the way, people I know locally who I regret forcing to share a communal space.  They get the FB request to make their profile disappear from my suggested contacts.  There aren't very many of those.  It wouldn't really matter, as neither of us would initiate contact with the other.

That leaves me with my ten or so.  All fondly remembered from decades past, though for most I am probably closer to them on Social Media than I was in the Ramapo Senior High School building or school bus.  And there's a secondary ten, people who used to show up more frequently, people of amiable presence and nimble mind worthy of a few sentences exchange.  The FB algorithm has done me a disservice, reducing their frequency on my screen. 

While their business model depends on my staring preferentially at their screens, FB has rightly become rationed time.  None of my current Semi-Annual initiatives require any Social Media.  More accurately, it is destructive to all these intermediate goals.  So putting an array of potential Friends expansions that nobody wants really doesn't keep me glued to the screen or the sponsors for any significant duration.  I'm content with my hundred or so reconnections from fifteen years back.  The ten active, the ten less frequent, and the eighty dormant.

Erroneous Algorithms

They keep coming.  Pictures of mansions I cannot afford, mostly owned by celebrities who I recognize.  Pictures of excessive sandwich plates from deli's I would not eat at.

It's not that I object to mansions.  Not at all.  On my travels, I often seek out the grandest of the grand.  Hearst Castle on my first trip to California.  Winterthur and Nemours near my home.  A few days in Newport.  The Biltmore when I go to visit The Great Smokies next month.  FDR Home and the Vanderbilt Mansion on a short stay in Hyde Park.  At one time I aspired to having a McMansion of my own, even visiting a few for sale at Sunday Open Houses.  Nearly all the grand estates I visited depended on inherited wealth, monuments to the self.  Forms of  look at me and visit when I am dead but not invited when I am alive sort of wealth.  While I can never attain a large fortune, and in late life I really don't want one, I do the same things in my very ample suburban development house that they do in theirs, though on a smaller scale.  I have a kitchen, though I produce from it what I want to eat without delegating anything to staff.  The public mansions I visit have no wastebaskets on display.  They have no paper scattered.  They have little open storage, other than elaborate bookcases.  My house has all these things.  I entertain, though less frequently, less elegantly, and on a smaller scale than the Grandees who built their estates more to impress than to enjoy.

FB feeds me something much different, and something not terribly appealing.  The sprawl in Florida or California by tech moguls or TV celebrities or athletes shout look at how much I have for myself.  Unlike San Simeon or the Newport Mansions, it is much less a shout of let me share with my guests what I created.  Undoubtedly, the Beautiful People have intense travel schedules that keep them from their pools or tennis courts.  They are displays, and an ostentation that FB thinks will have me coming back for more.  I try to Hide them or Snooze them but to no avail.  Their algorithm, I think erroneously, doesn't take the hint to try something else.

It misconstrued my fondness for Jewish deli's.  Every day I get photos of overstuffed corned beef on rye originating in multiple cities.  Virtually never kosher.  Perhaps I undermine myself in their algorithm placement by looking up the named restaurants to search their menus.  Always with a Reuben option, not kosher.  Katz, the granddaddy of them all, from its founding never made any pretense to being adherent to dietary laws. They promoted ethnic, and to be fair, avoid products inherently non-kosher irrespective of preparation.  

But not only are the pictures of the sandwiches lacking the standard I would set for myself, but they are excessive.  It would be unthinkable for me to pretend that a mound of pastrami, yes I am a sucker for kosher pastrami, would have the slices of rye bread as an afterthought.  Instead, when deli is available to me, I make my variations.  Sometimes mustard on the bread.  Often coleslaw atop the meat.  Never been a fan of Russian dressing but that was one of the most ordered options at the kosher Psychedelicatesin of my university years through the 1970s.  Those were sandwiches for a Sunday night treat, even a Sunday night destination or study hiatus.  And always amid people I knew.  The destination was never the pile of sliced cold cuts.  It was the ability to choose from a Kosher menu without restriction for a satisfaction that would not reappear for another week.

Facebook misjudged my likes.  I don't like ostentation.  It is not enjoyment.  I don't like envy, whether I wish I could have a house or a sandwich like that.  My pleasure is in making the most of what I have.  My house with its lawn, deck, kitchen, comfortable bed, climate control, and suitable guest areas.  For as often as I use a pool, or probably the celebrities are able to use theirs given their travel obligations, I can bundle the dip with my hotel stays.  I have enough food, maybe excessive food.  As much as I relish kosher pastrami, the barrier has been my willingness to choose that as my luxury, and to a lesser extent its availability.  I once lived in a place that had kosher delis. It's not like I've never experienced one.  I would not go there on a whim or very often.  FB photos of ostentatious heaps of corned beef don't change that.  

I don't know why their algorithms think that it might.

Attracting Me Back

No sign-ons to FB, X, or Reddit for a week.  All but FB has given up on me, or understood my value to them accurately.  FB does its best to entice my return.  The icon on my mobile app reads 32 notifications.  It increases by a few each day.  Reddit has 4, constant since day 2 of my respite.  Twitter has zero.  We do not miss each other.  

FB also sends messages to my email box.  People who I know, people who I care about, have continued posting in my absence.  FOMO, they anticipate.  I must know what these dear people expressed.  I don't think I missed any birthdays.  I don't know when the next FB Friend's birthday arrives.  There are two that I remember this month.  Each worthy of a special day with a generous greeting that likely will not arrive, but also not generate resentment in its absence.

I'm not ready for my Next Act there.  Perhaps when I go on vacation in another two weeks.

Notifications

My typical morning, excluding shabbos, begins with a screen once the preliminaries of dental care, newspaper retrieval, and a k-cup brew have been completed.  Restrict Social Media appears on my Daily Task List essentially automatically.  And I really do limit my access, though from time to time I will concentrate on either FB or r/Judaism as a personal focus.  But once coffee has been placed within reach of my laptop in My Space, I seek my notifications.  There are five:  emails, FB, Reddit, Twitter now Rated X, and my stats on Medium Daily Digest.  There's a habit to this, though an ambivalent one.  As Loneliness becomes rampant, with our devices as prime villains, there is a certain irony to the first connection to other people each morning should come from how people responded to us on our screens. Designers of these platforms, including psychology majors, have as their business models the attention time to their offerings preferentially to competitors' options.  And they helped create Loneliness so they know which crumbs to toss to offer a very transient reprieve.

All five forums for me are a little different.  Email is by far the most important, though very few messages come from people I know or from organizations I asked to contact me.  Still, there is frequently something from my wife or financial advisor that needs action.  Some of the passive notifications I solicited indirectly, whether notifications from the synagogue, receipts for payments that I made electronically, subscriptions of various types.  And then there are the unwelcome, transferred to spam, deleted without opening, unsubscribed after opening, or more often than not, just not opened.  And on occasion I will also find a notification that somebody else on another forum responded to a comment I had made on that other platform.

Next most important, though probably expendable, is Facebook.  It has taken an ugly transformation in the fourteen years since I subscribed.  FB's initial attraction was to reconnect with old friends and relatives.  Being some forty years past HS graduation, there was a not entirely healthy curiosity about where the decades had taken the people I once interacted with daily in the classroom, school bus, or gym class.  Most volunteered what they were up to.  I became closer to some that first year on FB than I was in HS, even got to see a few.  After establishing about a hundred FB style quasi-Friends, the number of contacts atrophied one or two at a time.  The nominal connections are still there if I ask for my Friends List, but the number of people who post in a way that reaches my daily passive screen has dwindled to just a few.  It has been replaced by algorithms, computer matches which my own keyboard use helps generate, or a perhaps degenerate, which then post things people want to sell me, donations I might like to consider for either causes or candidates, or updates on my preferred teams.  The real people no longer offer short posts about their lives or what they do, other than photos of destinations they are visiting as they visit them.  Still, every morning I can count on an icon that appears designed after the Liberty Bell with a red number next to it.  Open the bell, and I will get a summary of who liked something I had posted or commented upon. In a world of mostly Zero Responses, these are rarely zero.  And the Likes or related emotions nearly all originate with somebody I know personally.  Moreover, somebody on occasion exchanges an idea.

My Reddit feed differs a bit.  Anonymity is built into the platform and it is moderated for propriety, usually successfully.  Like FB, it has a Liberty Bell with a number attached to it.  However, it is a more multifunctional bell than FB's.  It does not ding for each like, but instead milestones of likes:  5, 10. 25. 50. That's as high as I've gotten, though I'm confident others have gone viral with the bell reflecting that.  It notifies me in duplicate when anyone has verbally responded to a comment that I have made.  One number appears next to the bell with a link to take me to the faux conversation, another notification is directed to my email Inbox.  And then there are unsolicited rings of the bell, comments that their algorithm personalizes to me, thinking I might want to read them, though I am not a participant in that Subreddit.  The bell gives me two options, other than going to that conversation.  I can delete the comment, my most typical response.  Or I can ask for no more notifications from that entire Subreddit, which I also do less frequently.  And while my preferred destination is r/Judaism, when I log on I get a Home feed with a lot of other topics other than my personal subscriptions.  Depending on interest, I will respond to some, an invitation to more notifications from that group, even though I am not enrolled in it.

While I do not know anyone on Reddit by platform design, I am quite helpful to a lot of other posters seeking knowledge and experience.  People come testing the waters of Judaism.  They are attending synagogue for the first time, maybe have let their connection to Judaism become dormant and would like to revive it.  We have guests from the Christian and Islamic world who wish to pose a polite question.  Being helpful to somebody else is one of the best defenses to established Loneliness, something Reddit enables far more than any other forum to which I subscribe.  And in some ways the comments, which are not length restricted, can be developed into forms of conversation.

The most problematic forum is Twitter, that public cesspool of ideas which unfortunately also had people of real public influence present in some way.  There are not many ways to give feedback to a journalist, elected official, top executive, or major scholar.  All generate hundreds of responses.  I know almost nobody personally, though many by reputation and by their public presence.  Likes are few, maybe one every few days, and rarely from the person of public prominence.  What I find, though, is that somebody of obscurity will read my comment and opt to follow me further.  These people, when their profiles are accessed, will typically be following 4000 people but have under 100 who follow them.  By contrast, I follow 37 and have 34 who have chosen to follow me. I cannot think of a more overt identification of Loneliness than seeking anyone who comes along randomly while attractiven nobody else in return.  I almost never initiate a political post, mostly share something I've written on my feed.  I've also deleted many a public figure, including some who have the most to say.  The reason, they post something every ten minutes through their waking hours.  And it arrives in my feed as clutter, since they say pretty much the same predictable things for every one of those q ten minute posts.  As a result, my time of that forum is severely rationed.  My most common Follow is The Atlantic, to which I have a subscription, and most common comment is a response to an article I have read there.  Responses in return have been minimal.  

Finally, I self-publish fifteen or so articles each year on Medium, which comes across as a daily digest.  While a freeloader, I have a handful of people who subscribe to my feed, and a small handful of people who read what I have written, or at least open the article.  While never a lot, there is always a measure of gratification to contributing to somebody else's mind.  I do not know these people and get close to zero comments in return.  But it takes only moments each morning to check.

So knowing how I relate, or really how my mind relates to people known and unknown, has an allure that seems difficult to set aside, though I do set it aside for Shabbos every Saturday.  I'm part of cyberspace.  The magnates who control cyberspace want me as part of it, which is more than I can say for people I know in person or through organizations who have done their best to exclude me.  It does not take a lot to feel included.  Mostly a bell shape on a screen with a single digit in red next to it.

Controlling Social Media Time

Social Media needs some personal restraint.  For a lot of people it has become destructive, a time sink that bypasses more substantive achievements that people could have, myself among them.  Yet its popularity, even when toxic or because of that toxic element, continues.  It is alluring.  Nobody really needs Adderall or Ritalin to pay attention, as attention is not needed.  A Tweet requires conservation of words, which means you can read a lot of them in a short time.  And as we keep our device and tablet screens in our visual focus, these programs assure us that there are other people on the other side.  We used to have other people at the Mall, and probably still do at the workplace.  The stadium may have tens of thousands of people, but they are not interactive with us.  The electronics match us to people who respond in an era when, even in the workplace, the cubicles and factory floors keep responses intermittent at best.

I am not on all platforms.  I never signed up for TikTok, which at least one state tried to ban.  A site restricted to physicians called Sermo wore out its welcome.  I don't miss it.  The WhatsApp app has been downloaded to my smartphone.  I never open it.

So my daily cyberspace surf sessions really begin with four, all with their own overlaps and their own uniqueness:

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Reddit
4. Twitter, now rated X

Each morning I go to all four, though not in the same sequence.  Any notifications from each, from the most trivial Like to the usual email updates of places where my subscription is intentional.  No message?  Move on.  More typically, I just admire myself momentarily for having posted something yesterday that caused a reaction in somebody else.

Then I move to my daily blog to begin composing the next entry. And my daily five crosswords come next.

But the discipline to do things that advance me yield to things that get my brain to release endorphins and enkephalins.  So at the very least succumb to the social media in a defensible way.  

Email enables me to conduct my personal business.  Its delete trash can makes it easy to clear.  By now I can recognize phishing and move it to spam.  That winnows the messages to notices of articles related to my professional activity, a writing group I subscribe to and periodically post what I have written, notices from reputable publications where I am also a subscriber or participant.  Requests to do a Torah reading arrive that way, along with notices of my synagogue's activities.  Clutter easily managed.  And there are times when I need to send somebody else a message.  Virtually no politically generated thought takes place in this forum.  

Facebook lives off its more glorious past.  Like many of my era, HS Class of '69, the lure of reconnecting with old chums, most in limbo for forty years, had endless merit.  We learned of each other's careers, families, geography, personal and political views, in a short summary, where their adult lives took them.  My HS had its bullies, but not a lot, and learning how to cope with them made most of us antifragile, fully capable of swimming through our personal circumstances.  While everyone on our contact list was designated Friend, we found gradients of friends to be the reality.  As we learn about people of our past nearing the completion of their careers, grandparents or at least empty nesters, the people we connected to as electronic friends were often very divergent from the people we had hung out with, shared classroom space with, or went to USY with as teens.  Was never close to the Cheerleader types then or now.  Found myself attracted to people whose posts and reactions displayed kindness.  Unfortunately, Facebook became Meta, algorithms ruled, and advertising made stockholders rich.  Those several dozen sources of electronic banter and sharing parts of our current lives dwindled to about fifteen, all admirable people if not the fifteen that I would have selected to continue from my original list of a hundred or so if free of algorithms.  But with those fifteen, we still share interests.  I like seeing places that they visit as they visit them.  Parents have died during that interval, with abundant messages of condolence.  Birthday greetings are conveyed by thoughtful reminders.  In order to get to the people, I have to endure a feed of twenty commercial, political, ideological, and otherwise disruptive messages.  And I have acquired my own Likes.  Pictures of cats, whether cute kitty or awesome tiger, can get a Like.  And I have my teams.  The algorithms figured out which ones they are.  So FB needs the time on it rationed, the responses mostly limited to messages to people I know personally who have made their own contribution, and maybe a swipe at a coach of one of my teams when they falter.  And as unsolicited faux news appears, I am generous with its remove procedure.  They ask you why.  "I find it offensive" needs to be added to the options.

Reddit enables me to think.  I subscribe to r/Judaism and r/Jewish cooking.  Unsubscribed to r/my  home state due to some unwelcome responses to one of my rare posts.  And usually I allow my initial screen to just be HOME with whatever the company thinks I should see.  There are thousands of subjects.  Everyone is anonymous with an avatar.  It also seems to be moderated, as trolls and overt nastiness is rare.  For r/Judaism I am a serious contributor.  People present dilemmas from anti-Semitic experiences to how to engage more to other queries more suitable to Dear Therapist.  My range of knowledge, my experience with synagogues and organizations, and my advanced age that has lived through how the Judaism of today got that way is helpful to scores of other people, Jewish and not.  Since my satisfaction as a contributor does not depend on keeping score with Likes, I can be at that site a very long time.  While often rewarding, I could and should be doing other things instead.

And finally, Twitter, that cesspool of toxic applications of the English language.  Its only redeeming feature is that people of major accomplishment, whether celebrities, elected officials, thinkers of the upper tier, have all established their base there.  While they travel in spheres other than mine, I am not likely to meet any of them.  But they let me into their electronic space where I can have my say if I keep to the rationed number of characters.  And it has helped my expressions.  When I exceed my allotment, I have to edit the response to make it more compact.  An unexpected benefit. People have been harmed by engaging too seriously, but if I really want is not friendship but access to ideas from people of public presence, that will suffice.  Harm to me is unlikely.

Sites I either neglect or reject are much larger that the four in which I engage. In another century, our endogenous CNS pleasure chemicals came from opium dens where people escaped from anything else they could be doing instead.  We have that now, more with X than with any of the others.  Except it is not really the escape from engagement but its illusion.  I keep a daily task list, created each evening, reviewed each morning, referenced periodically through the day until I compose a new one the next evening.  Engagement with old friends is on the list, FB being the best way to do that.  Many of these tasks, the writing and learning in particular, are also best done on screens, though my mind acting solo with what is presented or with what I create.  Engagement is better done selectively, even if helpful to others, as my contributions to r/Judaism often are.  Put your own mask on first.  Advance my own brain, environment, face to face encounters first.  And some rationed time for 

1. Email
2. Facebook
3. Reddit
4. Twitter, now rated X

Returning to Twitter

Twitter, now formally X but for most of its history probably Rated X as toxic, has settled into its new management. Yet with a war in progress, probably a just war to send the modern Amalakites who exploit whatever weaknesses they can identify without regard to consequences, I find myself lured back to commentary.  The service thrives in large part because of the vile nature of the people who display where mental reasoning bottoms out without an editor denying them their functioning SUBMIT icon.

But I have my ideas, too.  And I have the same SUBMIT icon as anyone else.  Needless to say, even as social media goes, my life hardly focuses on X as my forum.  I much prefer the more dignified Reddit where I know nobody, but also cannot tell who is either a public figure or personally accomplished.  Even FB puts me into connection with people that I know.  None are the best without conviction, none are the worst overcome by Yeats' passionate intensity.  I know them personally.  On X, I know many virtually, as they are often public figures with high profile positions, though none personally.  Some really are Yeats' the worst, but a few are also his best.   By now, a successful product of Smart America, I can tell which.

And like my FB personal friends, I have some conviction short of passionate intensity.  But I still have an intellect with sensibility.  My own perspectives may only generate a handful of reads and an occasional response, but it is a forum where I have at least enough conviction and intensity to report what I think to the few viewers that come by.  And with the world fraying around us as Yeats' worst spread their passionate intensity, I need to take ownership of my mind and my SUBMIT icon.

No Messages

FOMO.  My interactive electronics, other than telephone with my kids, shut down for shabbos each week.  From candle lighting Friday until the specified conclusion of shabbos on my congregation's weekly newsletter the internet gets placed someplace else, with rare exceptions like needing Waze to get where I need to go.  Festivals extend that.  These last two days.  When they begin on Wednesday night, or on rare occasions Saturday night, that extends to a three day internet free hiatus.  But mostly two days.  They can cluster a bit, like they do each fall for Rosh Hashanah, Sukkot, and Simchat Torah, plus the Shabbatot between them most years.  FOMO more at the beginning of this season.

I find myself in the middle.  Sukkot with its two days off ended, extended about an extra hour as I was having dinner with friends in a sukkah when the Festival time concluded.  I had left my cell phone in the car's cell phone holder, covered with a baseball cap to deter thievery.  When I returned to my car, Festival fully concluded, I just drove home.  No FOMO at all.

Into the house, supine posture on the living room couch, then see what I missed for two days.  Not exactly Nada, but nothing of any importance that would cause me any hesitation about setting the phone aside again next weekend.  All emails but one, some three dozen of them, from commercial or subscription sources, those automated messages that just go out from places that think I might want new tires or have an article that I have to read, or a FB friend had posted a message of some type not really directed at me personally.  Only one real notification, a message from an old friend wishing me a great Sukkot.  The FB notification bell read 14.  Majority were Likes of something I had posted about the Sukkot festival or something else.  Reminder that a Hagar the Horrible strip was open for view would never get opened, nor will a couple of real FB friends making one more post to share guidance from somebody else who shares their political hashkafa, which never gets opened lest I offer a false impression that I buy into something like that.  The text icon had only one message, that I am due to schedule platelet donation, which I already knew. My initiative to block unsolicited political messages over the past month seemed pretty successful.  Reddit r/Judaism, no messages.  They were all off for Sukkot too.  And Twitter, now appropriately Rated X as a public blight, had no responses to any of the few things I had posted.

So, it appears that much of cyberspace is very expendable.  We've probably known that for about a hundred years, ever since a personal telephone in the home became an American population norm.  When it rings we answer it.  Mostly still do.  For a long time, we wondered who might have called while we were away, mostly rationalizing those missed chances to chat with the largely correct assumption that people who really needed to reach us will call back.  Then we got answering machines and caller ID, so the compulsion to answer every ring before it stopped ringing became much less, though for many of my era never fully disappeared.  And in business and medical care, we accumulated secretaries, answering services, and beepers so there would never be FOMO in that setting.

While postal mail is never urgent, many of us are scripted to look out the door for the mail carrier.  Birthday or holiday cards could be open on arrival or deferred.  Letters, bills, bank statements all had their envelopes opened. Same with IRS refunds, and for those of us applying to schools that year, their correspondence was eagerly awaited each day. Solicitations for money, maybe not.  The nature of postal mail has shifted.  There are no letters, maybe a few greeting cards, no postcards of friends on vacation, bills on autopay and therefore either not notified by mail or already paid before the notices arrives.  Instead, we have a few periodicals, some by paid subscription, some a benefit from organizations where we hold membership, many unsolicited.  But mostly the daily mail is from somebody who desires a portion of our accumulated treasure, sometimes for a worthy cause, sometimes to enrich themselves.

And now we have things beyond our telephone calls that really are interactive.  Personally I don't care who or if anyone responds to my FB posts.  At one time when most of my Class of '69 enrolled, who is doing what today had more urgency than it does now.  Birthdays and anniversaries come while I am away on shabbos.  At one time a belated greeting went out, or if I remember I could be the first to convey my best wishes.  Now I'm just not part of FB that day.  Somewhere between sign-up and a fair number of years ago, notes from my friends mostly petered out in favor of pitches for things for me to buy or to believe in.  Those things don't seriously compete with shabbos or yontif when I am electronically away.  And the posts really haven't generated faux conversations for a considerable time

Some users of Twitter and Reddit try to handle their posts as dialog.  I don't.  I write what I want, let the readers do with it what they want.  No reason to respond to most whether shabbos or not.  

Some use their text messages as a conversation.  Good way to collide with something while driving.  And even if not driving, it's never as good as a telephone call for personal interaction with exchange of ideas.

So for two days periodically and one day every week, I have cyberspace rest.  No FOMO, as I am really not part of this global conversation in real time.  But in exchange, I get fifteen minutes of real interaction, those few minutes selecting who I want to talk to at kiddush or who might want to talk to me while we nosh on a mini black & white cookie and some babka.  Those only happen when the cell phones have been set aside.

Not Missing Facebook

Not posted for not quite half the month thus far.  Shared two stories of meaning to me, but do not recall what the first was.

Not wished anyone a standardized Happy Birthday.  Not opened notifications, even to read my friend's daily selection in Critica. And nobody seems to have missed me.

I don't feel deprived.  I don't have a hankering of any type to go back and tell somebody about the ordinary things and sometimes special things that I do.

Don't miss the political statements.  By now I have the hang of who supports what.

If anything about my hiatus amazes me so far, it has been how much unoccupied time has been recaptured.  I do not really know how much time I spend logged into various social media but the sponsors do.  Judging from large swaths of time this week that I've had to redirect, some in very gratifying ways, some in more obligatory ways, and some largely idle, it was a lot more than I would have estimated.

I don't plan to return now that I appreciate how anti-gratifying much of that recent experience has become.  In these two weeks, a few real electronic conversations have come my way, usually my comment with a thoughtful response from somebody I do not know except though presentations that captured my interest.  Real meaningful exchanges of ideas.  Something FB could have been, maybe even once was, but went for the sponsors instead.

Axing Social Media

Facebook came to me with great interest.  I was visiting my son, who had accepted a post-college research position, really a stop-gap activity until he could pursue a more permanent career, at NYU.  It had been a while since I abandoned going to the 7-Eleven for the NY Times.  Too high a fee and too little newsprint in the Outer Provinces.  But in NYC, what a deal!  And while reading it I understood why I had targeted obtaining a copy as a Sunday morning institution for so many years.  That morning's edition contained an article on the emergence of Facebook as a means of reconnecting with old friends.  At forty years post high school and with a reunion scheduled near my hometown just a few months hence, I never lost my interest in the people I once knew.  When I returned home, I enrolled in FB on my PC, reacquainted with more people than I could expect to see in the flesh that coming fall, catching up on forty years of old times.  People not very close to me in the 1960s evolved into people of accomplishment in the first decade of this century.  They had careers.  They had families.  They had pets.  They had religious and political stances, some predictable, many unexpected.  We bantered about old times.  As our children entered their marriages and careers, we shared that.  And geography.  As the scheduled reunion arrived, I now had FB as an entry to conversation and catch up. 

Back home. More nominal friends, a few finding me.  It was social media.  And then organizations of the welcome type found their way to my screen.  Medical sites.  Sports teams.  Subsets of my alma maters.  I had begun a new job shortly after, so lots of stories to tell and stories to hear.  No trolls for another election cycle.  

The unwelcome really nudged its way in rather insidiously about four years into my enrollment.  My new-found HS acquaintances had used up their pleasantries.  Too many became sloganeers who would share whatever unflattering photo or distorted comment of officials or even people they opposed.  People who I knew as congenial in person felt no need to be with their fingers on a keyboard.  As mid-decade with its toxic electoral cycle using FB as a forum, those common pleasantries of favorite football teams, sharing once in a lifetime travels, displaying culinary talent, all became subordinate to pitching your candidate or cause, which is probably OK until it becomes excessive or makes a turn from promoting your preference to vilifying the other.  

Limping along from there, some seven years have plodded on.  The corporate mission has changed from giving me a chance to connect with people of intersecting interest to disconnecting me from a portion of my money.  The people whose posts about career, family, travel, and kitchen rarely kept me in the loop of their activities or thoughts.  In its place came people I hardly knew from my youthful past, people who had little better to do than sit at their screens and type, unrestrained by either a clock or a desire to go outside to sample the rest of the world.  While I still have nominally about 100 Friends, I really only receive posts from about half a dozen, and not the same half a dozen I would have put on my priority connect list.  I made a commitment to never unfriend a HS classmate, and I haven't, but unfollowed a few.  I'm even pretty tolerant of those who sought me out, though those people do get Unfriended once they attack me or get too focused on frumkeit which I don't share.  

There still being a vestige of scientist in me, I did a series of counts on where unsolicited posts originated.  I looked at twenty consecutive posts, starting at a random point, counting how many came from people on my Friends List.  About half, replicated many times.  And how many of those were their own comments rather than Shares of some type?  Hopelessly few.

Time to depart.  I have been a FB Anti-Nazir in the past, with various schema.  I would stay away for a week.  Invariably my email would alert me to messages I had to read.  The company hires psych majors from the best schools who know how to keep customers looking at their screens and no others.  Mostly I resisted the bait, checking messages so not to overlook people's birthdays, even though my own greetings to them is pretty much templated.  I look at these interludes much as a do a vacation, time away with the intent of returning with a different perspective.  That never happens.  I've spun a virtual roulette wheel.  Odd numbers, I sign on to FB that day, even numbers including 0/00 I don't.  It works well, signing on a little less than half the days.  Downside, regretting the days I signed on that siphon me from other things I should be doing instead, with no real satisfaction of being there.

It's really time to exit.  I'm about a week into it, checked messages twice when alerted, regretted doing even that.  Deleted FB App from my phone.  Now, I have exited certain social media permanently in the past.  Twitter has been gone about a year.  Sermo, the physicians site, I abandoned shortly after retiring, more prompted by a change in their corporate format than any desire not to be among fellow physicians of diverse world and professional views.  The company just ruined the site.  Same with classmates.com where I reconnected with a fair number of old acquaintances.  Worth free with advertising subsidy, not worth monthly fee.  FB fulfilled this niche better and with no fee.  I don't miss any of them.  Probably wouldn't even remember my sign-in passwords for any of them.  

I wonder if these social media have life cycles like people, organizations, or businesses do.  There is a nascent idea, a period of growth, one of stability, one of decline.  Places I used to like to shop are no more. The congregation of my bar mitzvah completed its life cycle.  My current congregation is at the end of its life cycle.  We can debate about America.  What implodes the business and organizations is the loss of their attractiveness to people.  Those Reverse Roach Motels where they only check out.  

Looking at what FB Friends posts I receive, I cannot really tell if the people whose minds I value most opted out and just aren't posting anymore to anyone, or whether they are still active, but the corporate algorithms separate me from them.  But either way, that interactiveness that I learned about from the NY Times had its years of pleasurable reality.  It's not there anymore.  I don't find interactive at my synagogue either.  No response or separated from the responses that exist makes its own statement.  I made a proposal to myself to avoid FB this month.  Anti-Nazirs are usually time-bound in their vows.  But for now I'm seeing FB as a resource headed in the direction of Twitter and Sermo.

Did Instead

Success.  Went the whole day without opening FB or any other social media.  I got to make some comments via email for a committee question that was posed, but that's legitimated business.  And I didn't open anything other than FB either.  

While I compensate for my inattention by using a countdown timer for many tasks, I do not really know how much time was actually spending on FB et al., though the spies who log my activity do.  As I opened my email the following day, I had invitations subtle and direct telling me something was waiting for me on FB and Reddit.  One notice deleted, the other filed to Spam.

However, time is a constant.  If I am not scrolling and responding, I have to be doing something else.  I went to a park three short times, where I could relax in a breeze while my mind wanders.  Dishes all done.  Winter clothing all put away.  Laundry all done.  Mailbox repair completed once and for all.  Learned some of my next Torah portion.  Social media sinks my mind, but its absence really did not enhance my mind.  I did pleasurable stuff instead, though not taxing stuff.  At least not yet.

It remains my intent to not log on anywhere for a week, with predesignated exceptions for Mother's Day and to convey my next KevinMD article's publication when that happens.  I missed the mindlessness slightly the first day but did not take the bait to return even though it arrived promptly by algorithm.  It also remains my intent to use that alternative time on things that matter a whole lot more than touring the Metaverse.

fb assessment

A series of daily on Facebook Roulette kept me off the site except to check messages for a few consecutive days.  Then #31 landed in the virtual slot, allowing my return.  My perspective was different when navigating after a few days away.  When I signed on about ten years back, the allure was connection with friends from childhood who had drifted apart.  We had missed out on some forty years of living, new geography, careers, families.  There were also new people, those not at all close in high school but more visible and accommodating in cyberspace.  I never knew what any of them thought about political issues, religion, or even our school.  Forty years usually exposed interests from cooking to travel to music.  I knew who the extroverts and introverts were.  That rarely changes once established.  Yet I had no sense of people's wit, little of their humor, little of friendships maintained in reality.  This was different than the office, where I probed into people's lives for their benefit.  Here I probe, or more typically they volunteer, for my own curiosity, with no obligation in return.

Eventually my Friends List, or really contacts, grew to about 100,  A few got snoozed or even eliminated, but most just drifted on the list.  If my synagogue has attrition, so does my Friends List, though more remaining inactive than disappearing from the nominal census.  The sponsoring site seems to have transformed over those ten years as well, from a platform serving users to a money generator enabling companies to pitch their products or candidates to pitch their positions.

I knew that the people I most like responding to no longer appeared on my screen when they posted.  It is possible, though unlikely, that I antagonized them all.  Far more likely is that the Geeks created algorithms that reduced my interactive list to ten, and not the ten I would have selected if asked to vote on the Friends most valued for their minds and wit. 

On my day back, I did some counting.  Starting from a random place on my screen, I counted the next 20 posts. I did this about five or six times.  With each series of 20 less than ten came from my friends list.  The majority were companies trying to sell me something, organizations to which I subscribe or sometimes not, local political figures who had a message to convey.  But not personal voluntary disclosures of my friends.  And there weren't more than fifteen unique people when all the series of twenty were combined.

My best conclusion, though not the only possibility, is that the company really did redefine what a customer is.  As a nascent offering first generating popularity, uniqueness and attractiveness to potential users like me prevailed.  As it became a more mature company, I was no longer a valued customer but a target for messages from payers.  Who I wanted to interact with became subordinate to who the Geeks wanted me to interact with.  

FB was always a time sink, but initially one of justifiable allure.  Once the allure has dissipated, as seems the case, I can ration my participation more easily.  And FB Roulette seems a way to do it if I only want to restrict access by half.  Or I could go to Calendar 5/0 on.  Or I could just drop it, but there is still merit to wishing people well on their milestones and condolences on their losses.  It still enables that with efficiency.

Run of Evens

Facebook Roulette has largely established itself as my most successful mechanism for controlling the time sink of social media.  Odds, I'm a participant, Evens I check messages and greet people for their birthdays.  Other social media have come under control.  Twitter essentially gone, Bari Weiss and KevinMD have redeeming intellectual value without becoming excessive, Reddit Judaism enjoyable and controlled.  I really didn't know how FB would turn out until this week when the first thing in the morning spin came up an even number for several consecutive days.  I followed my rule.  I don't miss not being there.

Rationing Social Media

It seems rational to ration. And this is the week I will start doing it, or already have.  Reddit is on hiatus even though I like responding to r/Judaism.  Twitter is utterly toxic, nobodies gathering around celebrities that would walk the other way in person.  A pool of ignorami.  Bari Weiss' Common Sense I've limited to my response to what she posts as the daily read, one time, ask that comments on my comment after the first two not come to my email.  And I do not engage in virtual conversations with other responders. KevinMD I try to respond twice a week.  Thoughtful articles, thoughtful feedback. 

That leaves me to control the ultimate time sink FB.  It shouldn't be as difficult as it has been.  Most of the connections I value most have disappeared, presumably by an algorithm that placed ads for some schmutz that I neither need nor want ahead of the people I'm happy I was able to reconnect to from now a half century back.  Not a lot of thought is exchanged.  Birthday greetings, condolences, a goot shabbos.  But little thought and with the people I'd most like to have lunch with in person screened out either electronically or by their preference.  The fun of the first few years has long since waned.  When I announced that I might like to go to Florida soon, nobody in Florida seemed eager to meet me there for real.  It's because FB in the end, isn't real.

Having done this a few days, successful for all but FB, I think I can limit my access or at least my response when I have access.  One more challenge.

Avoiding Distractions

 One day, perhaps today, will be the day to set aside those screen distractions:  FB and Reddit primarily, where I am a contributor when I type, transiently engaged when I read, but when done have not produced anything important beyond a connection to an old friend from HS that was already there.  Email skirts that middle ground, containing significant communications amid the clutter.  But my Daily Task List will have a lot more completions and my Semi-Annual initiatives a lot better progress if I were more selective about what appears on my screen and how my typing skills respond.

Art Supplies

My dedication has come to a test.  For years, I have had watercoloring on my Daily Task List but never did it, along with several other recreation initiatives that I never did.  I have ample tins of watercolor paint at about a dollar per tin from back to school sales.  Each comes with a brush. Bought a small pad of watercolor paper once, placed safely to the left of the desk in My Space.  But I never, or almost never, used them. 

To prod me along, and to expand my horizons, I enrolled in a beginning watercolor class at OLLI.  Five weeks in the Art Studio, further invigorated by a brisk walk through the coldest month of the year to get there from the main building.  They sent me a list of needed supplies.  Not one of those back to school tins and the brush that comes with it.  Costly paper, tubes of paint, synthetic sable brushes in three sizes, and a couple of items that I don't quite know what they are for.  Almost like taking swimming lessons from somebody serious about it when what you really want to do is splash around in the water and make ripples.

My FB advisors, all women, unanimously recommend that I spend the money and learn to paint properly.  Money is not nearly as much of an object as willingness to spend it that way, but that's what the sages of the Right Brain recommend.  And I can use a Right Brain adventure.

 

Facebook Survey

FB invited me to answer some questions.  I don't know if they invited everyone, which would skew their sample as people with an axe to grind would be more likely to take them up on the offer, or whether they randomly invited a subset of users.  I took the bait and answered honestly.  Basically it has become another advertising medium like the newspaper and TV, offering me content for my attention but inserting commercial notices to offset their overhead for doing this.  And the consumers seem to be on the decline.

As a service, to which I have now subscribed twelve years, the more purposeful allure has run its course.  I renewed old friendships, some more firm now than when we interacted in school decades ago.  Little expansion has occurred.  Indeed, there is some contraction with presentations from some of my favorite  people much less frequent, sometimes essentially absent.

People used to exchange thoughts.  Now people resent the exchange, perhaps in parallel with resentment of challenges to ideas elsewhere in America.  People promote their agendas.  I know who is in Free America/ Smart America/ Real America/ Just America from what appears under their name.  People focus on milestones, responding in large numbers to birthdays and anniversaries.  There are condolences when an obit appears, though not many laudable summaries of the life just completed.  It has become Sound Bites for the eyes.

Most of life, which FB once reflected far better than it does now, has little to do with milestone events.  To get from one birthday to the next there are activities in some form every single day.  Special efforts to make dinner or take a course, fondness for a pet which still appears regularly, travel to a new place, the new restaurant, meeting somebody famous or highly accomplished, having a regrettable day at work.  FB could have captured lives.  Its users opted not to let it do that.

Reconsider Social Media

Facebook has again gotten out of hand.  After no Twitter, I'm back to a little Twitter which is limited but slowly accelerating.  Each diverts from things that I want to do more.  As I get to the month of semi-annual planning, starting with how my projects fared for the current cycle, I need to consider how badly I really wanted to do what I affirmed previously and reviewed daily, then take that bucket of time, energy, and resources in that direction.  FB and Twitter are not in that direction. 

Those Snoozed Have Returned

While op-eds of the toxic or intrusive nature of social media abound, I've not been inundated by anti-vaxxers, anti-Semites, not an alarming input from Trumpists or proselytizers.  I use my ability to regulate what appears on the screen pretty well, though unwelcome advertisers each get a second or two to imprint my cerebral cortex in exchange for the fees that support my access to what has been more useful than harmful.  I do less well creating a barrier to nudniks, those people who have some personal merit, ranging from a smidgen to a lot, who have nothing better to do than incessantly fill up my FB feed.  When it gets out of hand I snooze them for thirty days.  As much as I enjoy the interactive nature of the Post-Dispatch and the thoughtfulness of its reporters, I really don't need to scroll through thirty posts.  Even more so for somebody I don't know at all but who found me somewhere and for somebody who I also have never met but knows other family members who can sometimes post provocatively and sometimes abhorrently.  They all get snoozed more due to excessive volume than repulsive content.  

Apparently a month ago my patience must have reached its limit, as all three of those snoozed have returned on consecutive days.  So far none are out of hand, though the P-D's volume is skirting the edge.

Or I could snooze myself, which I have, something with its merits and limitations. Not yet.

Scrolled Right Through

One of my better decisions seems to have been to leave each day's access to FB and Tw to chance, in the form of a virtual roulette wheel.  The virtual marble has been settling in Even=No the last few days but this morning came of 17=Go For It.  I did.  No messages.  Upon scrolling nothing approaching a profound comment.  There were anniversaries to be acknowledged, as August has become the most popular wedding month, my own among them.  The usual political statements.  Pictures of cute animals and cute kids.  The vast wasteland hardly ended with Newton Minow's assessment of early television.  It has been repackaged for our day and for our amusement.

FOMO?  Not at all.