If you happened to be on OkCupid sometime in the past ten years (poor, familiar souls), you were likely to have come across a good-looking person with a frighteningly mediocre profile. Halfway down the page, right after they expressed their passion for basic needs (food, sleep), there it’d be, the sentence clause of your nightmares: “I don’t watch TV.” Usually, the author would follow it up with a gentle assertion of their intellectual superiority—“I prefer to read books,” or “I’d much rather see an independent film, or take a walk.” As thrilling as "taking a walk" might have been for some, still others (points at self) felt their sedentary little hearts shatter. For a while, the disclaimer seemed to joyfully recede — then disappear! — before it morphed into its latest ascetic incarnation: “I don’t do Facebook.”

Cue: collapse. The declaration came in multiple iterations and on multiple platforms, each apologia more priestly than the last:

The lonely humanist: “I don’t need social media. I prefer REAL-life interactions.”

The lofty visionary: “I just think when we’re all looking at our phones, we’re not really seeing each other. You know?”

The confused idealist: “I’m just taking some time off of Facebook to work on my [strange video memoir that will never be completed].”

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Not everyone appeared to go stone-cold sober. Some, it appeared, practiced a policy of harm-reduction. “I’m cutting out all my Facebook friends I hate," said the reasonable people. "If you say something racist or sexist, I’ll de-friend you!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!" warned the brave Internet heroes, changing the world, one irritating threat a time.

At first glance, the Facebook resistance army might seem weak, but their troops are rapidly graining ground. Just 50% of all teenagers use Facebook, down from 70% in 2012. Facebook is now rated third by teens amongst “cool” social networks (but #1 by hip principals everywhere). Some of this population may have simply moved to younger platforms like Instagram (owned by Facebook) and Snapchat (almost owned by Facebook). But while Facebook still enjoys 1.44 billion monthly active users (and growing), our generation’s psychological migration is real. Defecting from Facebook — no matter how long the absence — has become just as popular as joining it once was.

Take a look at the feast of Facebook studies that came out in 2015, each one more hysterical than the last. As of October 2015, Facebook — the number-one network for corgi videos — has been compared to, or correlated with:

As with most studies, some of these studies were debunked, or downgraded from emergency-level status. Facebook users who compared and contrasted themselves with high-achieving friends were at greater risk of depression than those who used the network to connect with family and friends. While Facebook might inspire ADHD-like symptoms, it does not, in fact, cause the disease. Using the ancient art of common sense, scientists recently discovered that Facebook does not induce tumors, as professional adults once believed.

Image: Corbis Images Loop Delay

Hysteria might be causing people to Google search “How to do a Facebook cleanse” (hint: turn it off), but size is the network’s chief antagonist. The bigger the platform grows, the larger the size of its psychological resistance. Back when TV was considered America’s #1 enemy, high-achieving parents across the nation limited their children’s programming to one PBS program per week (the NOVA, the horror!) Some American children weren’t so lucky and didn’t have TVs at all, forcing them to rely on the kindness of strangers and their cable. At the time, TV was accused of causing, among other diseases, autism, obesity, and permanent brain damage. Even as more and more Americans purchased more and more exceptional TVs at award-winning prices, joyless TV-resistance armies boldly conquered real psychological ground.

None of this is to say that Facebook or TV doesn’t pose real social and academic risks for users who become too dependent. It would be intellectually foolhardy, if not actually criminal, to suggest that spending your day fighting with people on Facebook doesn’t pose real risks to your health/personality. But excess usage — in a nation where the average teenagers spend over to 7.5 hours a day consuming media — seems to be pose the real danger, not actual use.

Still, anti-Facebook absolutists will continue to fight the good fight against the platform, for reasons both painfully real and imagined. Social media, they claim, poses a real threat to human interaction (even though it’s where many young queer people find community). Facebook, they argue, dulls literacy skills (even though it’s where 30% of adults get their news). People who read books from public libraries, extremists argue, are just naturally smarter humans than the soulless deadbeats who share viral stories emailed by their mom.

Nothing to fear: The Facebook apocalypse isn’t coming any time soon, and neither is its dictatorship. Even members of the TV resistance were always stealthily watching cable, just in more culturally acceptable venues like Netflix and Hulu. Facebook ascetics pose, as of now, no real statistical threat. While opposition grows, membership does too. Sure, there are obsessives, and there are Luddites. But most us continue to exist in the boring middle ground, spending an hour or two a day ignoring real responsibilities, so we can share meaningful selfies and open meaningless links. Even people with real academic degrees argue that watching cat videos is good for your mental health.

Does it matter? Of course not. Neither Facebookphobes nor Facebookholics nor Facebook users should be able to claim moral authority in an imaginary cultural war. Fighting about it seems like the ultimate unreadable Facebook fight, with no clear end in sight. No matter what we call ourselves, we’re all equals in the same dumb battlefield, logged in, or logged out.