I think many of us would still answer “yes” to that question. I have to admit I am a very bad social media customer, and that includes LinkedIn, which is supposed to be the grown-up one. If you contact me there, it may take me a week to notice. Possibly two, if it’s summer.
I have turned off notifications on my phone because they are distractions.I want to choose how I spend my time without being pulled into a picture of someone’s lunch, an endless scroll of ads, or an unsolvable math problem that I’m fairly sure exists only to piss us math nerds off. Social media seems to be mostly ads now, and I admit I am sometimes tempted to buy whatever they are selling. The algorithm has studied me closely and knows exactly which jacket I didn’t know I needed.
Many times, I have thought about deleting my Facebook account. What stops me is Sweden. That’s where my cousins’ kids are, along with my brother and his wife and their kids, and the people from my old ninth-grade class, who have aged suspiciously well.
It is hard enough to keep in touch when everyone has busy lives, so the connection matters. If someone likes to share, you get to see what’s going on in their life, and they are only one message away. Even if you never write, you know you can.
Facebook has also educated me. For instance, I learned that kids in Sweden now go trick-or-treating. This was not something we did when I was growing up. We had påskkärringar instead. At Easter, children dress up as Easter witches, with a headscarf, a painted-on freckle or two, and a copper kettle, and go door to door asking for candy or money. According to tradition, the real witches fly off to Blåkulla to dance with the devil, and the children, I assume, are there to keep up appearances. It’s a very Swedish solution: take something alarming and turn it into a seasonal activity.
So when I saw my brother’s kids in Halloween costumes, I wasn’t scandalized. I was just a little jealous. Nobody handed me a pumpkin bucket in the 1980s. Apparently, I am making up for it now.
My yard is full of skeletons and assorted skeleton parts, a werewolf about nine feet tall, and a ten-foot skeleton. Walk up the steps and you are greeted by an IT clown taller than me, holding a hammer, with glowing eyes. There’s an inflatable tree by the front door and two smoke machines. Two. Somewhere between Sweden and here, I appear to have become the Halloween department.
But yes, please tell me more about the children dressing up.
And that, I realize, is exactly why I can’t quit. I can resist most of the ads and ignore the math problems. But I can’t give up a window into a country that keeps changing without me.
So I’ll keep the account. Notifications stay off, I’ll answer messages whenever I get around to it, and everyone will go on waiting a week for my reply. But the door stays open, and in my family, that seems to be what matters. You don’t have to knock every day. You just have to know you can.