How a permanent Facebook detox improved my wellbeing
What if I told you that if you quit Facebook everything is going to be okay?
As someone who has had to deal with stereotypes and plenty of anxious moments, my use of social media has always had two sides: one has been trying to keep up with it all because it should give a sense of belonging and less social awkwardness; while on the other it has been struggling with all the pressure these tools put on me and that I put on myself for using them.
Being at rock bottom pushed me to break up with Facebook.
The common perception of today’s technology and communication culture is that if you are not using the trending services you’re left out of the cool kids, social activities in real life, worldwide events’ news or even face the possibility of missing a job offer. While to some extent that could be true, being at rock bottom pushed me to break up with Facebook, which is why I can assure you that [mostof the ] information relevant to you always finds a way to appear in front of whatever screen you are using, or even better, through someone’s mouth.
I understand the many advantages that social media tools provide organizing an event or spreading information, for example. That’s not the point, the issue is how bad Facebook is as a company that owns a lot of services that turn out to be toxic.
Deciding to leave Facebook was an easy choice in the sense that I had been wanting to do it for the longest time and because I never really liked it. If I had a Facebook profile was because everyone did and so I didn’t want to feel like I was missing out, especially while being in university when I had to contact some people and Facebook was supposedly and somehow less awkward.
I wish I had the guts back then to be left out.
Facebook is toxic by nature, because of the many ways in which it tries to bombard you with what it thinks you’re interested in, as well as how it invades your personal preferences with ads and a place for gossip that seems worse than the workspace or any other real-life scenario.
I could also mention the many privacy concerns with Facebook, which is another big reason why I decided to leave.
Logging into Facebook was a torture of having to see things I didn’t want to, and read comments or interactions from people I didn’t really care about but were my friends. This is an arguable situation since I could have deleted or muted people, but the problem lays in Facebook’s non-spoken core objective: sharing your entire life with everyone you know.
Recognizing that this is not an issue that many people face is also important. I know friends that don’t see any problem at all by using Facebook because they couldn’t care less about targeted posts, ads or gossip. So to them using Facebook is fine. They might not find it useful now but they still scroll through it at least once a day out of boredom.
I first tried minimizing my time spent on Facebook to only once every three or four days, but it didn’t make sense to me to keep a profile alive when I wasn’t really making use of it. When I finally decided to delete it, here’s what happened:
- I felt disconnected in a bad way. I thought that I was missing out on so many things. This didn’t last long though, it was a logical response.
- Mostly I felt a relief of letting go. Facebook was an online place that haunted me, while it included many people I honestly didn’t care much about.
- Cutting the noise from people was a great way to listen to myself and focus on what I wanted instead of what I was expected to do as a social norm or an ideal image posted on Facebook.
- I stopped wasting so much time scrolling as a way to kill boredom. There is nothing wrong with being bored and doing nothing.
- Gossip has been out of my life for the most part. I don’t find out about people’s lives as much as before and that is better. I am perfectly fine with only knowing about those that are close to me and through their own direct words.
In the end, the less Facebook around my life, the better it is. Instagram is slowly turning into a Facebook reincarnation, which has made me want to revaluate my presence there, but since I stick to photography 98% of the time, I should be fine at least in the near future.
I also left WhatsApp in the process, and the reasons why I did it are explained in this other post I recently wrote:
