Three weeks, ago I decided to delete my Facebook account, deleted nearly 18 years of virtual attachments. It was giving up an addiction and hard to do. This article is a reflection of social media in the 21st Century and how desensitising social media has made the human experience and how it distorts the human condition. This is written from this writer’s personal experience.
Like most people I joined Facebook as a way of keeping in touch with family and friends around the world. In the early days of Facebook, the experience was new and novel and it really felt like a good way to connect and build online communities. A big reason for this writer was my family and friends overseas in Europe and America.
I’ve lived most of my life in Australia and also lived for a period of time in Greece as a young boy in the 70’s during the dictatorship era of Greece. My family lived in the highlands of Epirus, a rustic throwback to another era more akin to the 19th century. We had no electricity, no running water, used kerosene lamps for lighting, potbelly stoves for cooking and a fireplace for heating. The winters were bitterly cold and the mountains snowcapped . After we migrated to Australia and many years later with my first paycheques from work, I started regular annual migrations back to Greece for the European summers during my four weeks of vacation from work. The desire to reconnect with the homeland was great.
The decades passed and in 2005 Facebook arrived in Australia, and at the time it felt like it was a great way to keep in touch with family back home and rebuild our community as a virtual community. From 2005 till 2020 my trips back to Greece became more interesting, balancing time spent with family to touring archaeological sites, watching ancient Greek plays in ancient theatres, and regular extravagant partying at Santorini, Mykonos, Paros and Naxos. It felt like a drug, sharing my adventures on Facebook. Every time it felt like an ephedrine rush.
Then any time I lived life - be it in Europe or Australia - subconsciously the motivation was not only to share life’s adventures with family and friends, but also with the world. To gain existential validation and a boost to the ego, and slowly, the majority of people I knew on Facebook did the same. It became an addiction for us all, and then the algorithm.
A constant bombardment of posts and reels; on death, violence, conflicts, war, protests, unrest, Palestinians, Israel, the incessant struggle of the left versus the right in Europe and the US, Sudan, Nigeria, religion, ego and vacuous shallow influencers, and the supposed death of the planet due to greenhouse gas emissions and identity politics. Yet the reality for the majority of humans on this planet is a constant struggle for survival, to provide food, shelter and a future for themselves and their families. They have no time for existential masturbation. Only a fraction of the western world has the luxury, comfort and security to reflect on and ruminate on the meaning of life. To construct meanings and juxtapose their own value systems on the rest of the world through postmodernist ideologies; and the algorithms on social media enable this, it creates a false illusion and a narrative - contrary to the lives of the majority of people on this planet, or what is also referred to as the ‘developing world.’
In the last five years, the addiction to Facebook became acute, more hours spent at night scrolling posts and reels, and the perception was that if one didn’t keep connected on Facebook, that one was living the life of a misanthrope - regardless of the real world physical interactions with family and circles of friends. Even back home in Greece, some relatives (who shall remain anonymous) - simple hillbilly rustic highland shepherds joined Facebook and started to share their lives.
But the photos and content were the same every time; photos of the same countryside, the same festivals, small moments that justified their own illusory glories, buttressing the delusions of their life meaning. It became sad and pathetic, idealised lives masking some dark undercurrents of Greek society; and these obvious contradictions caused me to experience cognitive dissonance. That became the catalyst for the motivation to consider deleting Facebook. Also the obvious difference between life in Europe and life in the new world, in Australia.
Firstly, I’ll briefly touch upon life in Australia, and then explore some of the dark undercurrents of modern Greece, to provide some context. What can I say about life in Australia? It’s a new world, a successful multicultural society, and that’s one of the best qualities about life in Australia. One leaves the old world behind and upon arriving in Australia it’s an opportunity to throw away old world hatreds, baggage, civilisational clashes, misogyny and patriarchal biases, ideas of class structure, religious orthodoxy and attitudes.
For this writer, this is the glorious aspect of living life here. An opportunity to reinvent oneself. Then there is the thoroughly healthy, outdoors and fitness-oriented living, the warmth and friendliness of everyday Australians, and the politics in Australia is refreshing. No polemic and combative left-right politics like in Europe and the US. Here there are centre-left and centre-right parties, and whoever wins an election, they then rule for all Australians from a centrist position, and Australians then get right behind the elected government. Then finally, there is the geography of Australia, located at the bottom of the world, part of the Asia-Pacific region. Away from the troubles of the northern hemisphere, and the attention in respect to what happens in the news for Australians is what happens here and to our northern Asia-Pacific neighbours. Besides a very tiny minority who spend their lives on social media - the majority of Australians couldn’t care less regarding what happens in Europe, Africa, the Middle East or the US.
Then we have some of the dark civilisational undercurrents of Modern Greece, undercurrents that need light shed on. On the surface, Greece is a magical and beautiful place, rich in history. But Greece is also suffocating under the burden and dead weight of its own history. A suffocating monoculture with unwritten strict norms and a societal pressure to conform.
Greece is still a very patriarchal society - and has been so continuously since the ancient times - with higher misogyny and femicide rates than the European average. Discourse in public can be overtly sexist, with unfiltered hate speech and misogyny being prevalent in social media and online spaces. While the rest of Europe went through a reformation and the enlightenment, in Greece - except for the Ionian Islands ( where my late mother is from) and which was ruled mostly by Venice and briefly by France since the fall of Constantinople - the rest of Greece was under Ottoman rule, and one can tell the difference. Where Italy is known for a north-south divide, in Greece the divide is western Greece versus the rest of Greece.
This writer’s late father would call my late mother not by her name, but by ‘woman’; not once by her first name. She was an asset and a housemaid, while he was a working class card playing misogynist-patriarchal undeducted yokel bumpkin from the hills who imagined himself as some kind of modern day shepherd-Homeric hero resisting the modern world, Whilst my late mother came from an educated classical world due to her famous middle-upper class trading family from Cephalonia. As a girl she learned deportment, the Walz, listened to theatre and opera, and tuning in to Italian radio stations was her favourite activity. This writer witnessed many moments of cruelty and greed, experiences that were and are still being experienced today by many women in Greece. The last straw for this writer and the majority of my siblings was when my mother died in 2021 in Australia. We decided on cremation rather than a traditional ‘big-fat Greek funeral’, and the reaction from Greek family overseas and the Greek community here cemented the decision to delete Facebook.
We were ostracised by the majority of the Greek community here in Australia, and a huge chunk of relatives back in Greece stopped talking to us altogether. All because we chose against the peer pressure to conform with the religious and societal expectations of a suffocating monocular, because we are progressive and separate church and state in our lives here in this new world.
The above is this writer’s societal observations on the mental and psychological affects of an addiction to Facebook, and one that many today silently suffer. Also on the illusion that it creates in regards to online communities based on family and friends (who some in fact never were that). It’s been three weeks now since I deleted Facebook, and pressure has lifted. I now experience life for myself and feel happier. Hopefully this story will help others reflect on and seek a more authentic life rooted in the real world. Carl Jung once said: “The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are”, and only by engaging with the real physical world, not the online world can this happen.
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Digital painting and cover by Nikos Laios
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