The Exhausted Dad: Scrolling Facebook to feel young
As an Old Millennial, I remember the early days of social media.
I made a friend named Tom at MySpace, and nobody yet understood the concept of catfishing. Yes, at least three of my friends in college had girlfriends who were models in Canada.
After a long, successful run of poisoning young minds and facilitating countless cases of identity theft, Facebook fell out of favor with the younger generations. Nowadays, TikTok rules the world. Most active users on Facebook now are just bots who argue with old folks about politics and vaccines.
I’m still there, too. For the nostalgia. Also, according to TikTokers, I am now considered one of those “old folks.”
While I understand all the criticism, Facebook has been good to me over the years. Sporadic contact with high school acquaintances gave me the confidence to completely skip my 10-year and 20-year high school reunions. Facebook, in its desperate attempt to stay relevant, continues to add features and content that piggyback on the popularity of other social media platforms. I never use TikTok, but I’ve seen plenty of hilarious “reels” of various adorable cats and doggies.
By far the No. 1 thing I love about Facebook is my previous use of Facebook. Back when my kids were babies, I regularly posted videos of their adorableness. It became the best way to share updates with extended family members.
“Oh, Grandma wants to see my son try to figure out how to crawl? Go to Facebook!”
“My daughter’s first choir concert? You bet! Facebook has a dimly lit video just for you!”
Since we had kids in the smartphone era, my wife and I documented almost every key moment of our four children’s early development. Most of it didn’t get posted to Facebook, of course, but don’t worry, we’ve saved everything in the digital cloud. You know, the one that tech companies promise will totally exist forever, even if modern society crumbles into oblivion.
Still, it takes a few extra steps to access my digital drive to watch videos from a particular period of early parenthood. Sometimes I even need to type in a password! And, obviously, I can’t expect to KNOW that password off the top of my head. I’ve reset it too many times already.
Facebook, however, understands my laziness. When I tap the icon to open Facebook every morning, my feed immediately jumps to my “Memories” from previous years of the current date. That’s when I see the VIP videos of my kids from yesteryear. By VIP, I mean the extra cute ones my wife and I felt compelled to share with our friends and family.
Late winter is a golden era for me posting adorable videos of my children, apparently. The cold weather meant fewer activities and more time to record random moments around the house. This past week alone I’ve been treated to several cherished moments of my oldest daughter’s personality explosion that happened between 6 and 8 months old, including:
• My daughter rolling around our living room floor while cradling a book. She kept babbling “Bah, bah, boo” as she flipped the pages. That counted as spoken English words!
• My daughter happily jumping up and down in her bouncer before suddenly and hilariously dozing off from exhaustion.
• Her snoring after she fell asleep in the bouncer.
The following year I recorded even more videos of my then-toddler daughter chatting with her baby brother. And I have a bunch from the following year as she taught her then-toddler brother how to dance like a princess.
This is basically the only reason I use Facebook in 2024. I go to the Memories, play the short videos a few times and close the app until the next day (unless I feel compelled to show my kids the videos later).
I worry that Facebook memories will be the only ones that stick in my brain into the future. Have I already forgotten unfilmed memories from those time periods? I should try to remember the password to the dang cloud so I can at least watch different videos occasionally.
I’m not posting anything new on Facebook, and I haven’t for a while. It means that as my kids have grown, I don’t have documented proof of their recent developments on Facebook (some are in the cloud! Probably!). My relatives in the Midwest have no idea what my kids look like. Even if I wanted to share, my aunt now has three different Facebook pages, and I can’t tell which ones were created by the Russians.
So while the rest of the world frets about the dangers of TikTok and other trendy social media, I’m sitting around every morning using good ol’ Facebook like a family photo album. I just try to remember NOT to accept new friend requests from my college friends’ ex-girlfriends from Canada.
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Tyler Wilson is a freelance writer, full-time student, and parent to four kids, ages 6-12. He is tired. He can be reached at twilson@cdapress.com.
The Exhausted Dad