Covid isolation made me a facebook addict
How Covid-19 Isolation Made Me Facebook Addict
Cleveland Plain Dealer November 10, 2020
Paul Keane
Five months of Covid-isolation have turned me into an addict. I didn’t intend for this to happen, but it did. I am addicted to facebook “likes” and “comments”.
Psychiatrists call what I am experiencing a “dopamine feedback loop”. That means that my brain gives me a squirt of dopamine ( nature’s heroin) every time I check my facebook page because I’m looking for a “like” or a “comment”, a sign that someone is paying attention to me. Facebook makes me feel important.
Here’s how it happened.
I’m 75 years old and a retired English teacher who taught in Vermont high schools from 1987–2012, twenty-four of those years at the same school.
When the Covid isolation began 5 months ago I had a dormant facebook page which I hadn’t used regularly in years. I had a total of 11 “friends” and I had no idea how to “friend” another person on facebook.
Enter Covid-isolation.
A colleague of mine who taught in my high school for years and has not yet retired but now had to Covid-isolate, asked me if I had a facebook page.
I said “yes” and after several tries we managed to connect with each other. Suddenly I was a “friend” on his facebook page and he was a “friend’ on my facebook page.
What I didn’t realize was that all of the hundreds of followers he had on his facebook page simultaneously acquired my name and the link to my facebook page.
Suddenly I started to get requests from dozens of former students who both of us had taught in our high school who — — like me — — were having to isolate due to Covid.
They, as young adults, were eager to keep busy and so was I.
So I scrolled though “My Pictures’ posting over 1000 photographs under different headings: Teaching; prom advisor; cars I had owned as a teacher ; shrubs blooming on my property during Covid: my dogs over 28 years; my childhood and family; my college years, etc., etc.
I quickly went from 11 friends to 190 friends. And each of those 190 friends now had “friends “ on their own facebook accounts who could access my facebook page and request “friend” status. Bingo, potential exponential growth.
I quickly made a rule for myself: I would only confirm “friend” requests from people who I knew personally or who had a connection to my schools.
In Covid-isolation people were paying more attention to me and my photographs than anyone had ever paid to me in my life. It was intoxicating. The “likes” soon became addicting. The same with “comments”.
But I got a creepy feeling: as a former teacher I might be a wet blanket on my former students’ adult lives. Maybe I would cramp their style, as the saying goes.
I decided not to “follow” anyone who had been a student but to remain “friends” and let them follow me if they so desired. If they made a comment I would answer.
A 2018 survey found that the average cell-phone user checks his/her phone 52 times a day. With 270 million cell phones active in America, that’s 14 billion phone checks every day.
I saw the truth of that statistic the minute I read it. In Covid-isolation I easily check my cell phone 52 times a day, and probably 35 of those are facebook checks. I had become a pest — — — to myself.
My own pest “friend”.
______________________________________________________________
