How my local laundromat finally helped me “quit” Facebook

It happened again. Looking forward to a quiet hour of reading while I washed my comforter, I was immediately assaulted with CNN on the corner TV, the pundits dissecting our government crisis du jour, in this case the shutdown.

What does this have to do with Facebook? I’m getting there.

As a one-time journalist, I used to pride myself on critical, thoughtful and voracious consumption of the news. Not anymore.

When it became clear that a steady diet of doomsday stories about the Trump administration were giving me full-blown anxiety attacks, I knew I had to dial back my late night news reading, especially vis-a-vis social media.

I tried setting bedtimes. I tried setting timers and blockers on my computer.

I tried limiting my postings to avoid irritating my friends by sharing each and every news article or think piece I found interesting, and dear God, were there SO MANY I found interesting. I am a very intellectually curious person, to a fault, and this is not necessarily an asset in the real wold.

I swore I was only going to get my news from the printed newspaper. (the way God intended, if you ask me). But bad news truly is everywhere. Even before my laundry was finished drying, I found myself in an argument with a stranger in a buried Facebook thread. It seems that even among the glut of news consumption options, Facebook has become uniquely troublesome. Why is that?