My Facebook Page Is a Zombie, but I Only Feed It When I Have To

Zombie social media platform held by a chain

“Long-time readers” (if you are reading this now, this means YOU) might remember that more than nine months ago, I deactivated my Facebook profile and wrote about it here, calling the whole experience "not net positive" and meaning every word. This site was the analog answer, a place to write without a feed deciding who saw it.

So, with all the dignity of someone who swore off carbs and then bought a donut, I have a confession. I raised it from the dead.

I want to be honest about what that actually means, because it would be easy to soften it into something it is not. Reactivating that account did not quietly hand me a shoebox of old photos and shuffle off. It brought the whole thing back, feed, notifications, all of it, groaning to life exactly as loud as the day I killed it. What is different is not the platform. Zombies do not change. What changed is that I keep this one on a leash now, and I only let it out to fetch. Maybe go for a short walk.

The Art of Voice moved from Wix to Squarespace this year, and every build item is done, including the four Creative sub-pages: Machine Muses and Mischief, Fields and Fables, Light and Life, and Crafted with Care. The pages were built, but some of the images were not sitting anywhere I could reach. Totally my fault. The only copies that existed lived on Facebook and nowhere on my own machine. I blame cell phones.

At any rate, logging back in felt like unlocking a storage unit with something faintly undead pacing around inside it. I found what I needed, downloaded it to my desktop, and started dropping the files into Squarespace by hand, one at a time. No integration, no handshake between the two platforms, just me and a very patient zombie passing files back and forth like a prisoner exchange. Full disclosure, I did take a brief look around to check on some people and I may or may not have watched a few reels, but I promise it was only 15 minutes tops.

But the photos were not the whole reason I let it out of the ground. Around the same time, I was rebuilding my LinkedIn presence and building VERA, the AI chief of staff that now runs my mornings and closes out my evenings, and between all three projects something became impossible to keep ignoring: social media, in 2026, is a necessary evil. Not a good thing, not something I have made peace with the way I made peace with paying taxes, just something a person cannot fully function without anymore. The pipeline that gets someone seen, hired, or simply kept in the loop runs straight through the platforms I spent that whole September post trying to bury. Keeping up with the Joneses has become keeping up with the Jetsons, and I no longer believe I get to opt out of that particular race, however much I would enjoy watching it shuffle off a cliff.

That is not a reversal of the September post either. It is a resignation, the kind a person makes once they stop arguing with the facts on the ground and start negotiating terms with the zombie instead. The pipeline is here, it is real, and it is not going away no matter how loudly I complain about it in a blog post. So the strategy changed. Instead of trying to avoid the machine, I am trying to run it instead of letting it run me, and that is most of what VERA is actually for. It is also why a page I killed for my own good is now shuffling around again, on a much shorter chain than before.

The hardest part was admitting that walking away from something does not always mean it stays gone. The goal was never to escape the machine. It was to get a leash long enough to walk the zombie without losing an arm.