Return to Facebook
The drawback to taking a break from posting on social media is that I don't have a place to moan and groan about the thousand and one paper cut annoyances that texture my days.
Or perhaps that isn't a drawback.
At least one prompted me to take action instead. I deleted an Instagram post featuring a restaurant that I will no longer patronise. The kind people there refused me a table for two at 4.30pm on a Sunday, because they were turning over for dinner. That practice is entirely within their rights, as it is entirely within mine to go somewhere else.
That decision felt good. So many of the tiny injustices of the modern world are beyond my power to redress. Oh, sure, I minimise how much I use Google and Amazon because I dislike them, but their economic and online stranglehold makes it difficult for me to avoid them entirely, for example.
I can't imagine that a minor boycott from one man who sometimes indulges in overpriced (but delicious) cake and coffee will make a difference, and I'm not quite incensed enough to name the outlet, but it satisfies me, and maybe that's enough.
The photo below I took one afternoon at Orchard Road, where I stopped to pick up my new iPad from the Apple Store. After much consideration, I decided that while I use my iPad a great deal, I don't need the latest and greatest one. I got the most modest of the line, the adjective-less iPad. While it is two years old now, it is more than powerful enough for my purposes, and has recently had a price reduction so it only cost me $499 with my education discount.
$500 for the computing device that I carry with me almost all the time and use for hours every day in lieu of a laptop seems a modest investment: that it frees up funds for expensive lunches and indulgent post-lunch desserts is a bonus.
End result will probably be more food posts to Instagram (and shared here) and presumably more activity on Facebook. I am concerned that I'm generating more content for Facebook to monetise and to train its AI on, but I'll think about how to deal with that another time.
