The popular social networking site known as "Bookface"

Kat went back to Los Angeles this afternoon, but it’s not a big deal. Which is itself a big deal! She was in Texas for nearly three weeks, she’ll be in L.A. for eight days, then back in Texas for—well, no idea, really. Two weeks? Maybe three? The plan for now is to be together in Texas for Christmas and New Year’s, and then to figure out the rest of the plan after that. At some point, she’ll go back to L.A. If it’s early in the month, I’ll probably drop her off at the airport the same way I did this afternoon. If it’s later in the month, then we’ll both get into the Hyundai Sonata and drive out there with the dog, and spend a month or so in California, missing the worst of cedar season. Either way, she’ll be here for a while, then we’ll be together out there for a while, and then—well, I have no idea what “and then” will be, but that’s nothing new. I haven’t had much idea what would happen beyond a month or two for more than a year now. That, too, is no-big-deal-and-thus-a-big-deal. Taking her to the airport this afternoon felt like dropping her off at work. It’s just normal. Lots of things can be normal.

Also normal, and related in ways I didn’t really think about: I got off Facebook about four weeks ago. I was a fairly heavy user of the site, and there was an initial detox period where I felt compelled to click that bookmark, and didn’t quite know what to do with myself. Then I got used to it, and stopped thinking about it as much. I know that when people cut out something we all recognize as toxic and addictive, like social media, there’s an impulse to talk about how great the decision has been—how they’re happier, or more productive, or finally have time to paint again now that they’re not fighting with a childhood friend’s uncle about Donald Trump for six hours a day. I would not say that there have been many of those benefits for me. I’m neither happier nor less happy. The time I wasted on Facebook is almost certainly wasted on something else. I refresh fantasy football rankings more often. I still don’t paint.

But I haven’t missed it much, either. A few weeks before I left, there was an hour or so one morning when Facebook went down. I remember thinking that I would be just fine if it never came back. What made me anxious was the thought of everyone else still using it, all hanging out without me. That feeling gets easier, though.

Except that Kat was here for most of the time that I did my Facebook detox, and now she’s gone. Which means that I work from home and live alone, and for much of the past year, a lot of my social contact has come through exchanging a couple hundred dollars worth of personal data to Mark Zuckerberg for regular access to all of my friends and family.

Which is the weirdest thing about Facebook. It doesn’t make sense that some company should have control over how often we are able to interact with our friends and family, but that’s where we are. I’ve tried other ways to do it—Twitter, which is not really any better for the world; Instagram, which I use much more shallowly; MeWe, a social network that a handful of my friends joined around the time I left Facebook, and which gets updated by someone about once a day; more personal interaction—texting, email, making plans to see one another. A couple of days ago, my friend Erin mailed me a VHS copy of Rocky III that we inadvertently stole from a Blockbuster fifteen years ago, along with a nice note. That’s much better than a Facebook comment, but unreliable.

And that reliability is important. Facebook has been around for, what, 12 or 13 years now? The impact of that is that there’s an innate expectation that we are constantly connected. Being off of Facebook means that losing that connection. It all becomes much more conscious, which is good, but, again, unreliable.

When Kat’s around, that’s okay. In a couple of days, we’ll see.

It’s a big deal—that’s become normal, and thus an even bigger deal—when so much of a person’s social life runs through a website that works, actively, to make the world worse because of both the fact that it exists at all and also the decisions made by the people who run it. And nobody seems to have a good answer to it. Get off of it, you’re a hermit standing on principle, Doug Forcett out there apologizing to every bug you accidentally step on in the woods. Stay on it, you are fueling something that facilitates genocide by successfully monetizing its users friendships.

And we all make those kinds of bargains every day. We eat meat, knowing that eating meat involves suffering and environmental damage. Or we don’t, but we’re aware somewhere in the back of our minds that the tomatoes in the salad got there because generations worth of economic policies many of us have benefitted from put someone in such dire straits that they signed themselves up to be exploited in the process of growing, harvesting, and serving it up. We all draw our own lines, they’re all largely arbitrary, and they’re all worth drawing. We just pick the ones that we decide not to cross.

Lately, for me, it’s been Facebook. Maybe it’ll continue to be, or maybe I’ll get bored and lonely and end up back on it for a while. Either way, though, it really is something to step back, look at what feels normal to you, and try to understand what it is you’re really looking at.