In mid-May of 2019, I decided to deactivative Facebook and remove it from my life. This is my 8-month update on the venture.

As with any uncharted territory, I was very apprenhensive on deactivating my account. I was worried about missing out on events or knowledge. I was even worried about potentially drifting apart from friends. But I realized that I needed to find out if the grass is greener on the other side, and that hesitation would lead to inaction. So in one fell swoop over a weekend, I hit the button and deactivated.

In the first few weeks of being off Facebook, I found that old habits died hard. I would still browse to the Facebook URL without even thinking about it, but never took it a step further and logged in. That habit eventually occurred less frequently until it was nonexistant.

The worry about feeling disconnected from my friends was mostly unfounded. Before deactivating Facebook, I posted that I would drop off and so my closer friends know to contact me via phone or even Facebook Messenger. (Yes, when you deactivate your account, Facebook Messenger is still fully operational so you can still talk with everyone in your friends list, and this certainly eases the dropoff process.) I still get invites to events and still have a good rapport with everyone. Contact with less-close friends still happens sporadically, but I feel that I’m living more in the moment when I only focus my communication with the friends who have kept in touch with me since I dropped off.

One unintended side effect is that I felt that my time just browsing the internet in general started to increase some, particularly on my phone when I was idling about. A couple months later, I established a 30-minute timer on the Chrome app on my phone in an attempt to curb this and adhere more to the digital minimalism philosphy. However, it has only had moderate impact. Although now I tend to think about if I want to use up some of my 30 minutes browsing my usual sites, I still get locked out after 30 minutes more than I would ideally like to. In addition, occassionally I tend to disable it if I’m on vacation and need to use mobile internet for reference purposes (which opens up the floodgates for more mindless browsing).

In September I briefly rejoined Facebook to announce my solo trip to Seoul, South Korea and to post pictures there. In an ideal world I would have just linked the Google Photos album I was making and direct people there, but I recognize people want you to do the work for them. A lot of my relatives and friends have never been to another country, much less to Korea, and I felt that I was giving people a unique experience via my pictures and statuses over the course of that week. I had already decided to deactivate Facebook again soon after the trip, but the desire to drop off was exacerbated by a more intense annoyance of all the vitriol and negativity that I observed on Facebook. I was surprised at this sudden feeling for certain! My working theory is that I was numb to all the politics and crap that was all over Facebook when I was on before the first deactivation, and that 3-month period between May and September “unnumbed” me. So when I joined again briefly during my trip, I was probably hypersensitive to that same negative stuff that was merely a nuisance in the past. I’m not big into politics to begin with (and certainly negativity), so I cannot even imagine how anasthetized those addicted to Facebook or those who instigate such nastiness are to all this.

Interestingly and unexpectedly enough, I have had numerous friends tell me in person that they miss me on Facebook and wish that I would return. Apparently, a lot of friends really enjoy reading my posts and commented about either the humor in them or that they are a breath of fresh air compared to all the other junk on Facebook. I’m quite flattered about this, and all this talk has made me think about rejoining on numerous occasions. But it is important to remember that I am doing this for myself, and if I were to rejoin that would have to be because I feel that is better for me at that time. When I am getting flattery and having people tell me they miss me on the platform, I have to remember that the innate desire to feel wanted and appreciated is a factor but not the only factor.

Anyways, I have very much enjoyed getting off the Facebook train, and I have grown very accustomed to a life without Facebook. If anyone ends up reading this post, I want them to know that those hesistations about leaving Facebook (particularly those related to missing out) are trivial… your friends will find a way to contact or make time for you after you leave. I was thinking of reactivating again soon to get all my photos off of Facebook to migrate to Google Photos (which I should have done before dropping off the first time) but I believe that I am firmly not missing anything by not being a member of Facebook.