When I was seven years old, my favorite restaurant in the world was Ponderosa Steakhouse. If you weren’t fortunate enough to have one of these fine dining establishments in your town, allow me to explain. In its heyday during the 80s and 90s, Ponderosa was a chain restaurant known for its impressive array of mediocre buffet food. Tender shrimp encased in a golden coating; racks of ribs dripping in sticky barbecue sauce; a salad bar that stretched as far as my overzealous eyes could see. And then there were the desserts. Puddings, pies, fat slices of chocolate cake—a veritable dreamscape for any 80s kid who grew up on stale Hostess cupcakes and microwaved Kids Cuisine brownies. From where I stood at four feet high, this was the pinnacle of fine dining.
I’d move through the line with my plate hot from the warmer, stacking it high with foods that had no business sharing the same real estate. And when I ran out of room, I’d skip back to our green plastic booth, safe in the knowledge that there was no limit to the amount of times I could return to the buffet. Ponderosa was perfection; I loved it, and it loved me. Until the day I overdid it on the creamed corn and soft serve ice cream, my eyes too big for my stomach, as my father explained. On the drive back, I curled up on the worn upholstery, knees to chest, riding the waves of nausea all the way home. I vowed that I would never eat at Ponderosa again.
When Instagram announced its addition of Threads earlier this week, I couldn’t help but think of us as kids let loose at a mediocre buffet, thrilled to death as the chef makes a show of placing another shitty option under the heat lamp. I'll admit, curiosity got the best of me—I shuffled into line like everyone else and heaped a helping on my plate. It’s Twitter in the good old days, people have been saying. This is the best place on the internet right now, people have been saying. And honestly, I don’t hate it yet. But how long, I wonder, until this picture perfect ice cream sundae turns into a stomachache of epic proportions?
It’s a strange phenomenon that we as a society seem to be wholly over social media, and yet we keep signing up for more of it in the hopes of recapturing those lost golden years when the internet was good. But we’ve moved so far beyond that now, and the skeptic in me thinks it’s unlikely we’ll ever get back to it. At its core, social media is a yearning for true human connection, which is why I find myself both drawn to and repelled by it, depending on the day of the week. When I feel lonely or needy or unfulfilled, I shuffle back to the buffet that keeps making me sick, plate held high, asking for more of the same. And when I’m connected and secure and fulfilled, I toss the plate down, peel out of the parking lot, and vow I’ll never step foot in the restaurant again. Month after month, year after year, the cycle repeats itself.
Lately, my life has been overflowing with human connection and I find myself retreating once again from those online spaces. I take pictures that are just for me. I swallow down the witty one liners that would play so well on Twitter. I write and bake and read and cry and jump on the trampoline with my kids and live a life that doesn’t need to be prettied up for public consumption. And it feels so fucking freeing. This will be the time I stay away for good, I think. But of course, it’s not. It never is.
Over the years, Ponderosa has done seemingly everything it could to stay alive. It’s been bought and sold, filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy, merged with other businesses, rebranded under different names. Where there were once nearly 700 restaurants across the US, there are now only 17 remaining. Which is how our family stopped going: the only location near us closed down and we never stepped foot in one again. And this, I realize, is what I keep hoping will happen, that social media will eventually close up shop for good and then I won’t have to be the one to make the decision to stop returning to it, time and time again. How much simpler that would be. But unless all of us collectively decide that we’re going to get our human connection in person the way we used to, social media will keep living on as our shitty consolation prize.
I don’t have a neat bow to wrap up these musings. Just a lot of frustration and endless questions. Where do we go from here? At what point do we decide that enough is enough? Once everyone has 12 different social media channels? 15? Once we’re spending the majority of our waking hours on our phones? In our haste to accept Threads as the answer to our internet woes, let us not forget that it’s owned by Meta, a company that would like us to eventually live our entire lives in an augmented virtual reality. Maybe they don’t actually have our best interests in mind.
For my part, I’m going to keep having an existential crisis about it in the hopes that eventually I’ll figure out where it fits—or doesn’t—into my life. But for now, you can find me on Threads, hoping like hell I can stave off another stomachache.
We have to remember how it was to function without it first. There is a whole generation that doesn’t know what life is like without social media. You are hilarious it this piece by the way.
Such an accurate analogy! I keep thinking the pendulum has swung the other way, and everyone is burnt out on social media. But I don’t know if that will really change how people are using it.