The Last Days of Social Media. Or: What I Saw From My Window in Botoșani

My father died without ever having had a Facebook account.

Not on principle. Not out of some considered conviction about the nature of the digital age. He simply never got round to it, or never felt the need — he was the sort of man who sorted things out face to face, with a hand on a spanner, a direct look, and a word given that stood in place of a written contract. Mechanics of his generation had no use for an "online presence." They had something more durable: a neighbourhood reputation, built decade by decade, from work done properly and from word of mouth.

I think of him now when I unlock my phone and see what has become of the social networks in which I once, for a time, believed there might be something genuine.

There isn't. Not any longer.

The Feed as Visual Desert

In the morning, before my son wakes and before I make coffee, I pick up the phone out of an inertia I no longer manage well. It is more muscular reflex than intention. Thumb on glass, scroll, scroll. What I see resembles a conveyor belt transporting identical goods repackaged in slightly different wrapping: ten posts featuring the same stock portrait and the same breathless "click here for something free," three replies from filter-smoothed avatars with identically inflated lips directing me towards "exclusive content," an advertisement for a cashback crypto card, a football clip in which the players move awkwardly, like puppets whose strings have been poorly calibrated.

Between them, rarely, something human. A friend from school who has posted a photograph of his garden. A neighbour announcing he has changed his car. An acquaintance from the industry writing something about a project. These fragments of actual life are drowning in an ocean of content produced by algorithms, bots, and people who have adapted so thoroughly to the logic of machines that you can no longer tell where the person ends and the automation begins.

This is what we are now: content among contents.

Social networks were built on a romantic promise — that your friends who couldn't attend would see your wedding, that grandparents would know their granddaughter had taken her first steps into nursery, that people whom distance would otherwise have separated could remain in touch. It worked, for a while. I have my own memories from 2009 and 2010, when Facebook felt like a provincial market — crowded, noisy, but full of familiar faces, real conversations, a certain communal warmth that you could not have manufactured.

That's gone.

What remains is a visual desert with false oases.

Initial title: The Corner Market and the Digital Fiefdoms — On Trust That Has Retreated Back Into the Neighbourhood.

An essay on platforms that have become infrastructure, on the slow erosion of the trust upon which they rested, on the fragmentation of the internet itself into mutually hostile national fragments, and on the public's retreat into an ever-narrowing circle of neighbourly proximity.

Translator's note. This essay was written in Romanian and adapted for an international readership. Where the original relies on local imagery — a small provincial market in north-eastern Romania, a family lineage of mechanics, references to Romanian intellectual tradition — I have kept the imagery but added brief explanatory notes for readers unfamiliar with the context. The Romanian original of this essay is available at petrucojocaru.ro.

I. The Machine That Still Works

The market on the corner has no official name. The people from the street simply call it the small market, to distinguish it from the big one, where one enters beneath a tin-lettered sign and where the stalls are lined up like the parking bays of a supermarket. At the small market, people do not come merely with a shopping bag. They come with a second of respite between two obligations, with the question "how are you?" addressed to someone they have known for ten years, with the suspicion that the tomato from the third crate is better than the one from the first, because someone brought it in from Cristești.¹

The vendor on the corner has a coffee machine — a classic La Cimbali with a manual lever, probably bought second-hand fifteen years ago. The chrome plate is scratched around the portafilter; the lever handle has acquired that particular lustre which only a hand pressing it daily can produce; the pressure is still within parameters. Her coffee is better than the one from the petrol station across the road, where a ten-thousand-euro automatic machine with a touch-screen stands unattended. Not because her beans are more expensive, but because the lever is pressed by a hand that knows, and the water passes through the coffee at the rhythm it should. It is, if you like, a small monument to what Constantin Noica would have called the utterance in things — the object which says, through its very functioning, what it is.²

When someone remarks, in passing, that the tomato from the corner tastes of coffee, it is not an insult, and it is not a laboured metaphor. It is a form of recommendation. The speaker means: there is something in that place which holds together the small things of quality. Good coffee and good tomatoes stand at the same counter not by coincidence, but through what we might call — in less scholarly language — a way of being of the place. A microcosm in which trust is not requested; it is observed. The vendor does not tell you the tomato is good; she lets you smell it. The coffee holds no barista certification; it has the taste one remembers. This place operates on a fund of pre-institutional trust — the kind the Romanian village knew for centuries, and which the city has preserved, almost without realising it, in its little islands of small commerce.

I recall this scene because in the 2026 Edelman Trust Barometer — the most extensive global survey of trust, now in its twenty-sixth edition — a figure appears which explains the scene without describing it.³ To the question of who still commands standing in the public's eyes, governments have lost sixteen points over five years, major news organisations eleven, and foreign business leaders six. Neighbours, family, and friends have gained eleven. It is the most brutal shift of trust ever recorded by this instrument: from We to Me, as the authors of the report put it. Or, more precisely: from institution to street corner. This is the hour of small markets. This is the hour of manual coffee machines and of vendors who know where the tomatoes come from.

In an age when checking one's phone has become an almost involuntary reflex, a growing number of young people are beginning to ask themselves: what would it actually feel like to give up social media entirely? The phenomenon of the "digital detox" is no longer a passing trend — it has become a necessity recognised by specialists in mental health. Recent research offers fascinating perspectives on the psychological effects of this withdrawal, and the findings are not always what you might expect.

The wisdom found in personal development literature, alongside insights from specialist research, gives us a broader view of this thoroughly modern challenge. The key to success lies in a gradual approach: replacing online activity with offline alternatives, and building a genuine system of social support in the real world. For the generation that grew up in the digital age, this kind of detox does not mean rejecting technology — it means rediscovering the balance between the virtual world and the real one.

Reduction in anxiety and stress

The first and most thoroughly documented benefit of quitting social media is a dramatic reduction in anxiety. The study by Hunt and colleagues, published in The Lancet in 2019, demonstrated remarkable effects on the mental health of young people who limited their use of social networks.

• A significant drop in anxiety: Restricting use to thirty minutes per day reduced anxiety levels among study participants by 25 per cent, according to the Lancet research.

• A reduction in FOMO (fear of missing out): "The fear of missing something important diminishes considerably when you are no longer bombarded with constant updates from other people's lives," Hunt explains in the study.

• Elimination of social comparison: Dr Patti Valkenburg observes in Current Directions in Psychological Science that "constant social comparison on online platforms is one of the principal causes of diminished self-esteem."

• Stabilisation of mood: Research shows that the extreme mood fluctuations characteristic of heavy social media users tend to level out after withdrawal.

Nobody dies. Nobody fights. And yet it is one of the most dangerous episodes in the Odyssey.

When the Athenaeum Book Club recently posted about the Lotus-Eaters episode in Homer, the comments exploded in an unexpected way. Not with learned literary analyses, but with immediate, visceral recognition. 'That's me with TikTok.' 'This perfectly describes my generation.' 'It took me three years to leave the island.' Someone wrote, simply and sharply: 'My 15-year-old boy is happy there. And that frightens me more than any monster in mythology.'

Homer wrote the Odyssey approximately 2,800 years ago. And yet, in 2026, the island of the Lotus-Eaters is no longer a geographical metaphor — it is an app downloaded onto a phone, a streaming subscription active at three in the morning, a day off transformed into eight hours of passive scrolling.

The thesis of this article is simple and uncomfortable: the hero's greatest enemy is not the cyclops who devours his men, not the sirens who call him towards the rocks, not even Poseidon who turns his ships back. The greatest enemy is the comfort that makes you forget why you left home — and above all, that you left at all.