Facebook teaches me a lesson: what that "village" we wax nostalgic about really looks like in 2024

(Especially for moms. Did Zuck see this one coming?)

Could I really quit social media?

Like most of us (I think), I have pretty complicated feelings about social media. I have, at times, claimed that I could—and would love to—give it up entirely, but for lots of reasons, that’s not really a possibility. As a person who works largely online, that would sort of be the ultimate in self-sabotage.

Facebook is a different case, though.

Like most millennials, I have a soft spot in my heart for the OG FB, as it was my first real foray into this social media world that now occupies so much of our lives. Sure, we had MySpace, but those profiles were so much more about indulging oneself than actually connecting with other people. Facebook launched at the perfect time for me to use it to connect with friends from home before I went away to college and friends from college when I returned home from breaks. The summer before my freshman year, I joined a new, cool thing called a Facebook Group, in which other kids set to be part of the same incoming college class got to know each other and felt ever so slightly less awkward arriving to campus for move-in. I even met my freshman year roommates there!

In the years since then, though, we all know that Facebook has changed. The user base has aged up—and not only because of people like me who joined when they were eighteen and are now in their thirties. As of 2020, the majority of regular Facebook users were Baby Boomers and Gen X-ers. I’m certainly not here to shade anyone from a generation ahead of me, but let’s not pretend that this shift hasn’t brought with it a change in the way the platform is used. Combine that with heavy politicization around the 2016 and 2020 elections, random cooking memes that show up uninvited on your feed, and an algorithm that reinforces your preexisting beliefs by dishing out echo chamber-style content and you’ve got yourself a social media tool that looks nothing like what I signed up for when I was a senior in high school. (That tool allowed me to virtually poke people and encouraged me to cycle through at least three different emo song lyrics a day in the name of “updating my status.” I’ll let you be the judge of whether we’re making progress or regressing.)

If you’d asked me one year ago to choose an app to drop, there’s no doubt I would have picked Facebook. And that still might be the case—but in recent months, I have to give it credit for teaching me an important lesson about the notion of “it takes a village” and the way it can still be relevant in 2024.

I doubled down a little bit on Facebook earlier this year because I thought it would be a good way to make mom friends.

CIRCLING BACK: Hi, it's me, making mom friends.

And it’s done that… at least a little bit.

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Currently Reading: The Astrology House by Carinn Jade

I would say that my interest in and knowledge of astrology ever so slightly over-indexes your average person, but I would love to learn more about it—and I already know that I love stories of fancy people behaving questionably. I’m interviewing the author of The Astrology House (who is represented by the same literary agent I am!) for a special podcast episode on Monday, and finishing the book ranks high on the list of my most anticipated weekend plans.

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I also dove further into Facebook as a new mom because I’d heard some buzz that it was a great place to find local resources and support—and that’s where it really came in handy. I won’t get into all the hairy details, but securing and managing childcare that we feel good about for the first year of Will’s life—especially given the somewhat untraditional structure of my work situation—has probably been the most challenging element of parenthood in our house. After some false starts, I decided to take to the storied Facebook mom groups for several nearby neighborhoods to see if there would be guidance and/or options there.

I was relieved to find both. And when a sudden change in our caregiver’s circumstances necessitated a back-to-the-drawing-board moment recently, I did the same thing… and once again, I wasn’t disappointed. I found the help I was looking for, help that made me feel better than what I could find in any of the other places people suggested.

It got me thinking a lot about the concept of the whole “it takes a village” idea that we seem to so broadly long for in 2024. Is Facebook—the very place where we see vicious political attacks and annoying AI-generated images that have us falsely believing that sequels of our all-time favorite movies are currently in the works—the best place for us to cultivate those villages now? And not just to cultivate them socially, but also practically and financially?

I’m not sure that that’s my hypothesis, but I can tell you without a doubt that Facebook groups have absolutely helped me to better understand what these cooperative villages look like in our modern world, and to feel more confident about my place in mine.

Hear me out.