My Hiatus From Facebook

I deactivated my Facebook for about six weeks in late-February-early April.

And I never thought about it.

There were some links I was sent that I couldn’t open, and I missed out on a lot of photos, but it didn’t change my life to not be able to see a funny 10 second video.

I stopped being curious and needing to see what everyone was doing. And if I did wonder about them, I sent them a note or called them. 

That is the lesson: If you wonder about someone, reach out to them. It can make you feel good and connected to them to have a conversation rather than just look at their photos (and then compare your life with theirs, and all the FOMO that goes with that).

Facebook uses algorithms to show you what you want to see. To keep you in the spiral of continuing to scroll, of feeling like you need to keep looking and you need to keep scrolling. This is the attention economy.

Your attention on Facebook is valuable to them. The more time you spend on their app, the more ads they can show you and the more money they make. You may never even click on an add on Facebook, but maybe you see running shoes on Facebook and you don’t really want them so you ignore it. Maybe you see an ad for a similar product before a suggested video or in someone’s video you follow. Two weeks later, you see some ad about a fit challenge to run every day for 30 days. Then you think ‘maybe I do need some new running shoes,’ so you do a search and the first shoes that come up are the ones you saw a few times on Facebook.

Algorithms all over the internet track your searches and how much time you spend looking at ads, which gauge your interest in the product. There is a lot of data being tracked that you aren’t even aware of.

So you may think you don’t buy into ads on social media, but days, weeks or months later you may ‘decide’ you need something, but it could be because you saw it on Facebook and other websites many times earlier.

This is advertising. It’s not illegal to advertise, but it can be kind of creepy the way ads can follow you around now. We give these free platforms access to so much of our data. And I’m not sure I like it.

Being away from Facebook felt like a breath of fresh air. I never thought about it. My brain was clearer. I wasn’t secretly thinking about what to post next or what others are posting or how many likes or comments I got on my page. I didn’t feel like I was missing out on anyone’s posts or events.

I was living my life once again. I wasn’t living for others or to see how other people were living. I could just be myself and think for myself for the first time in a long time.

Even when I came back to Facebook, I can tell I fall back into the spiral of advertisements, of needing to check it every day, to see what I missed, to see what other people are doing, to see what the news is, to see what drama is happening…

I may deactivate it again. Now I know I have that option. Getting off, gaining the clarity, now that I’m back, I’m way less dependent on it. It actually annoys me more than it ever has so I don’t spend a lot of time on it.

If you are curious about what steps I took, here is what I did to prepare my journey off Facebook.

1. I un-friend people I didn’t know or want to be friends with when I came back

2. I got distracted and scrolled thru Facebook

3. I downloaded all my photo albums to back up drives

4. I dragged my feet and scrolled thru Facebook

5. I posted that I was leaving Facebook and when

6. I accepted and worked through the guilt that came with everyone questioning and posting comments about me leaving

7. I went to settings and deactivated my account

8. I took a breath

You can always skip all of my steps and just deactivate for a while (you can always log in again and it will be the same as when you left it).

If you are really done and want to delete your Facebook permanently, then you can download your photo albums if you want and go for it. Let me know how it goes.

It may be a little scary at first to think about what people will think of your choice.

It may be a little lonely to miss seeing what’s going on with your extended relatives and friends.

It may be a little boring to wonder what to do with your time now.

But it is so refreshing to not be bombarded with everyone’s thoughts on everything, all the ads, all the photos and videos and noise that comes with Facebook.