My New Approach To Facebook: Don’t Use It

I opened a Facebook account in 2007, and in the more than a decade since then, it has quietly integrated itself into the fabric of my social life, becoming the primary source for many important things:

• Connecting with family and friends
• Staying informed about current issues
• Engaging with my community

Arguably, gathering these functions together in one place provides a benefit to my social life by increasing convenience and reducing friction. In fact, I doubt I would be writing this post at all, if it wasn’t for one thing: For some number of months now—or perhaps years—Facebook has made me feel gross every time I use it (and I’m not alone). “Gross” as in kind of dirty, kind of regretful, and yet hungry in anticipation, all at the same time. I suspect it’s similar to the way people feel while they’re blowing through a wad of cash at a casino slot machine, and I know from experience that it’s similar to the feeling during and after eating an entire bag of Cheetos.

Until recently, this was a feeling I inflicted on myself multiple times per day. Whenever I had a spare moment, I would open the Facebook app or a tab in my browser to check for new notifications, and end up scrolling compulsively through the endless stream of deeply weird, Facebook-y things, clicking the Like button on repetitive pictures of my friends’ cute kids, cringing at overwrought public displays of righteous anger, writing (not very) witty retorts to random observations, and laughing at gratuitous animal videos and kitschy jokes. It was worse when I actually posted something (which was rare), because then I would check twice as frequently, hoping another friend had liked or commented on it since the last time I looked.

I’ve tried “taking a break” from Facebook twice, once way back in 2012, and the other in November, 2016. Both times I managed to keep mostly off of it for one to two months, only to pick it back up one day, right where I left off. Evidently, “I don’t like to feel gross” has not been a compelling enough reason on its own to forego the easy, regular hits of endorphins I get from seeing that I have new notifications.

Well, lately I’ve been thinking more about why Facebook makes me feel gross, and it comes down to the intention behind its functionality. I mean, if it was actually designed for the purpose of enhancing my social life, it wouldn’t feel gross, would it? But Facebook’s business model isn’t really a secret, and it is the true purpose behind the veneer of social benefit that makes me queasy.

I don’t like to be surveilled. Facebook attempts to track everything we do online, even when we’re not on the site, and even when we’re logged out.

I don’t like to be manipulated. Facebook is designed to be addictive, and its algorithms optimize and prioritize content that gets shared the most, which happens to largely be content that induces moral outrage, hatred, fear, and other strong emotions.

I don’t like to be exploited. Through its surveillance and emotional manipulation, Facebook mines my attention to collect unsettlingly intimate details about me, and it uses that information to make money.

Clarifying these feelings in my mind has inspired me to make a more strategic third attempt at leaving Facebook behind. Since going “cold turkey” hasn’t worked in the past, this time my approach has been to phase it out gradually.

The first step was to turn off all Facebook notifications on my smart phone. When that didn’t seem to reduce the amount of time I spent compulsively checking the timeline, I deleted the app altogether. This was actually quite effective at reducing the total time I spent on the platform (though it didn’t really mitigate the separate issue of spending too much time hunched over my phone, because I just started using Twitter more often, but that’s a post for another day).

However, I was still checking Facebook frequently on my laptop, and I knew I needed to do something more drastic if I wanted to make a permanent change to my usage habits. I thought about deactivating my account, which is what Facebook guides you into doing when you think you want to quit, and which I’ve tried before. The problem is, reactivating is as simple as logging back in, so the barrier to re-entry is intentionally, invisibly low. I also considered deleting my account altogether, which would be a quick, clean, permanent break. However, because so many other people have also come to rely on Facebook at least as much as I have, there are many friends and family for whom Facebook is the only connection I have to them. I decided I wasn’t ready to lose all of those connections without an available alternative.

At this point I ran across a blog post that a fellow BGI graduate had written, I Like You. But, I Unfollowed You. In it, she describes a conundrum similar to my own, and her simple solution: unfollowing all of her friends (“unfollowing” someone is different from “unfriending” them because you still have an authorized connection to their account, you just don’t see anything that they post). She had promising results:

And just like that the urge was eliminated. That nagging draw, that wicked sense of trying to keep up with one more “inbox” which was supposed to be fun (?) was now no longer weighing on me.

Her reasoning for not permanently deleting her account fit for me as well:

So why stay on at all? Facebook is the ultimate CRM — and the Events and Messenger features are useful to me and groups of intersecting friends.

One other thing I liked about this approach is that the amount of effort it would take to go through and unfollow each person individually would be difficult to undo, and thus I suspected it would be more likely to stick. So I decided to give it a shot. Over the course of a day, I unfollowed everyone. Every single one of my 500+ Facebook friends. Even close friends, and even my mother (Sorry, Mom, I’ll call you). When I finished, the timeline was suddenly very quiet, like it had been redesigned by introverts. And… that was it. The desire to constantly check it was gone. And I have no regrets.

Now comes the harder part: filling in the gaps left in my social fabric where I had been relying on Facebook, while most of the rest of the people I know are still using Facebook. I’ve got lots of (rather quaint) ideas for how to go about it, and most of them require more effort than clicking a few Like buttons, but maybe putting in the effort is the whole point of friendship anyway?

Calling/texting people. In our current age of social media and chat apps, I perceive that calling someone out of the blue, even someone you know fairly well, is sometimes jarring, and not always socially acceptable. I hardly ever do it with people under 50. I have one friend, though, who calls me periodically, “just to heckle”, and I’m always glad when he does. I have another friend who, after moving away, decided she was going to go through her phone’s contact list alphabetically and call everyone, just to stay in touch and catch up. We had a great conversation. I guess what I’m telling myself here is that it doesn’t have to be awkward.

Sending out a holiday card/personal update. I used to do this, but it has probably been over a decade since the last one (hey, that’s when I created a Facebook account…) I like receiving these from other people, and I always feel guilty when I don’t send one back. It’s nice to get a compact summary from someone you don’t see very often on what they’ve been up to for the last year, without the pictures of their lunch. And with all the time I’m saving by not scrolling endlessly through Facebook, I should be able to fit in writing something, collecting addresses, and sending it out. Maybe I’ll do an email one instead of a printed card, to make it easier. Maybe I could even send one this year. Maybe in a month or two. Maybe.

Blogging. They say it’s coming back. I’ve always been terrible at it, but at least when I post something to my blog, I still own the content, and Facebook doesn’t make money off of it. The trick is remembering to post stuff, then getting my friends and family to read it, and also finding out which of my friends are blogging as well, so I can read theirs…

Subscribing to email newsletters and RSS feeds. You may not have heard this yet, but email newsletters are super hot. Most organizations still have them, so you can stay informed about all kinds of current news and engaged with all kinds of local events in your community. The difference between subscribing to a newsletter or RSS feed vs. following an organization on Facebook is that the organization gets to choose which content you see (instead of Facebook’s algorithms deciding), and you get to pick and choose which of the content they send is most relevant for you (instead of happening across it in your timeline, and then never finding it again).

There’s still a lot I haven’t figured out yet. Like, how will I stay current with the latest memes and cat videos? How can I prevent Facebook from tracking me everywhere? (Partial answer here.) How will I exchange clever banter with old friends and acquaintances that live on the other side of the country? How will I find out about the last minute’s breaking news? (Just kidding, breaking news is totally overrated and I really don’t need to know about it immediately. Unlike the cat videos.) If you’ve made it this far, dear reader, and you have ideas for coping with Facebook withdrawal, I’d love to hear them.

As it stands, there are still a few active groups I belong to on Facebook, and there are still a couple of local organizations and businesses I follow, because they don’t have an email newsletter (yet!). These are all that I see when I scroll through my timeline. In comparison to a “normal” timeline, it’s kind of quiet, and benign, and not gross. Still, after about five minutes, I’m relieved when I get to this: