Done.

 It's been a month since I last posted on Facebook. That's not quite true. I put up an advert for my occasional disco night, Same Old Scene, and a couple of R.I.P. tributes to Tony Head and Dave Hockney. But I've not put anything of myself on there. No awkward exchanges in shops, no thumbnail sketches of films, no howls of anguish about politics. I went to England and didn't mention it. I went to Dublin for a book launch and my lips were sealed. Nothing has been said. There were fucking riots on my road and I kept schtum. 

It was an experiment of sorts. I wanted to see what would happen. Though, equally, I'm mistrustful of Meta, and concerned I may be trapped in the sunk cost fallacy of having volunteered decades worth of zingers and howlers just for the dopamine drip drip drip of diminishing returns. Also, I've been quite depressed lately, and just haven't had the energy. 

So, what happened? Nothing happened. Not a single thing. No one noticed. It wasn't exactly Stephen Fry flouncing off Twitter in a huff. I wasn't in a huff. I was exhausted. And it felt like a couple of decades of wasted time. Thus it proved. 

No one noticed I was gone. My DMs were not flooded by concerned parties. I stopped posting and everyone forgot I existed. Like when you die, the admin quickly dries up. 

Good. 

I'll continue to post adverts for my various activities. I'll post RIPs to people I like who died. I might share the occasional article or cartoon. I'll change my status photo occasionally. But I'll stop feeding the nickles into the nickelodeon. It's done anyway. It's not fit for purpose anymore. They ignored the Mike Love dictum: they fucked with the formula. 

During my sabbatical from social media I've written a lot more, I've drawn more, and I'm thinking of starting painting again. I'd given up the guitar, but I will go back to it again, toughen up these baby pink fingertips. Social media was a longform experiment and at one point it was a genuine boon. It had a point. But not now. Not anymore. 

It's done.