Five months of COVID-19 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 — 24 of those years at Hartford High School.
When the COVID-19 isolation began five months ago, I had a dormant Facebook page that I hadn’t used regularly in years. I had a total of 11 “friends,” and no idea how to “friend” another person.
Enter pandemic isolation.
A colleague of mine who has not yet retired but now also had to self-isolate asked me if I had a Facebook page.
I said yes, and after several tries we managed to connect. Suddenly I was a “friend” on his Facebook page and he was a “friend” on mine.
What I didn’t realize was that all of the hundreds of followers he had on his page simultaneously acquired my name and the link to my page. Soon I started to get requests from dozens of former students who we had both taught and who, like both of us, were having to isolate.
They were eager to keep busy, and so was I.
So I scrolled though “My Pictures,” posting more than 1,000 photographs under different headings: Teaching, prom adviser, cars I had owned as a teacher, shrubs blooming on my property, 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 pages who could access my Facebook page and request “friend” status.
Bingo: Potential exponential growth.
I quickly made a rule for myself: I would confirm “friend” requests only from people I knew personally or who I knew had a connection to my schools.
Before long, people were paying more attention to me and my photographs while I was cooped up in COVID-19 isolation 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 the feeling that, as a former teacher, I might sometimes 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 cellphone user checks the phone 52 times a day. With 270 million cellphones active in America, that’s 14 billion phone checks every day.
I saw the truth of that statistic the minute I read it. In isolation, I easily check my cellphone 52 times a day, and probably 35 of those are Facebook checks.
I had become a pest to myself.
My own pest “friend.”
Paul Keane lives in Hartford Village.