Progress & impediments: Why I’m leaving Facebook
Back on January 1, I posted my New Year’s Resolutions, here. Sorry to report less than satisfactory progress on all but one goal, learning German. Thanks to the exercises on DuoLingo, that’s going quite well. I can now read texts much more easily, though still with frequent recourse to the dictionary.
However, my main purpose in learning this language was to advance the writing of my new novel, which deals with the complicated role of Germans — some very brave and humanitarian, other, as we know, quite horrible — in shaping Europe and the world since 1918. And besides research for the novel, to enable me to read current thinking by some of Germany’s most important thinkers, starting with Jürgen Habermas.
This brings up my problems with Facebook. Part of the reason for poor progress on writing what will be my novel #3 — which for now I’m simply calling “N3” — has been the time-consuming effort to restore access to my Facebook account, which has been hacked over and over recently. That is, I recover access, and then the hacker strikes again, and I have to go through the complicated steps to demonstrate that I am I, the true account owner.
This has made me reflect that my time is too valuable to waste on this, and that I can live and work better without that distraction. I shall turn 83 in a couple of days, so it’s time to devote all my best energy to what I’ve set as my most important goals. I may have not more than a decade or two left to do it, so I need to get busy!
If I do manage to restore access to my Facebook account one more time, I’ll post a link to this blog note, and invite anyone intrested in maintaining contact to subscribe to the blog. And then I’ll terminate that account! Wish me luck.
