I find myself opening social apps on my phone a lot less often. I come from the age of OG Facebook when it was restricted just to certain colleges, which Florida State got in early. It was reverse-chronological and just showed me people I knew. I miss that.
Just like everyone else in 2026, my algorithm knows me scary well. Baseball, triathlon, weather, nerd stuff. But also…I just don’t care about anything it’s showing me now.
I now get random photos of random people doing random 5k races. I’m happy for them. But I don’t know who they are. What am I supposed to do with this?
Or there are the reposts of the random quote, joke, or thought. Cool. Somebody liked it or found it relatable, so they reshared it to their feed. Now it’s on mine. But again, what am I supposed to do with this?
The flip side is also true: I guess random people are getting shown my nonsense. If you don’t personally know me, I truly cannot imagine any scenario where anything I post is of any value to you.
When the almighty algorithm does bless me with people I know, it’s not original content. It’s not pictures they took during their weekend. It’s the boring reshare of a quote or a reel. Or it’s a political hot take where they’re not changing their mind on the topic and nobody else is either, in spite of the dozens of comments back and forth. Or, the worst of all, it’s the person who quietly has sponsors. Their post isn’t actually anything other than an ad in disguise.
Social media in 2026 feels like getting into my car, putting it in neutral, and slamming on the gas for five minutes. There’s a lot of energy here, but it’s wasted energy. I accomplished nothing.
Take me back to 2005 in Tallahassee. I know we’re all old now, but I miss the days of opening up social media and actually seeing what everyone was up to.
Beyond following along with what friends are doing, social media has also basically been a personal journal. Do something memorable, post the pics, repeat. Over time, it becomes a collection of everything fun and worth remembering for me. I know that nobody else is going to look at my old albums, but when I want to scratch a nostalgia itch, it’s just a couple of taps away.
But do I still want that to be stored in this place? Everyone’s political posts make me cynical about the world in general. The reshares of reels from a random person leave me bored. This place used to be an easy way to keep up with friends who lived in different cities. Not anymore.
I have no witty or insightful conclusion other than this.
Three years ago, I started publishing my Ironman race reports on my own website instead of as posts on social media. My logic was that these are highly memorable days for me and I wanted to own that content myself. Posting a link to my website tanks my reach in the eyes of the almighty algorithm, but who cares? I assume that most everyone has no reason to spend 10 minutes reading a detailed account of how my race weekend went. (And I’m OK with that!) But decades from now, when I’m bald and in a walker, I want to know that those photos and my words are safe and in my digital possession for me to be able to revisit.
Perhaps I should be doing that with everything, not just Ironman race days. Cause whether it’s Facebook, Twitter, Threads, Instagram…these places all kinda suck now.
I’m not there yet, but I think I’m approaching my post-social media era.
