Part 4 of 4: Quitting Facebook & the Withdrawal Experience
Doing something requires more physical or emotional exertion than doing nothing and quitting Facebook at the end of January proved no exception.
While I had mulled the thought of ceasing use since the end of the year, once the seed to stop was planted I found myself looking for reaffirming evidence that quitting Facebook was the right thing to do.
My pet peeves—pictures of lunch, re-posts of testimony, irritating game invitations, mean people, gun wavers, and other mindless things—seemed to line up to leap off the page, irritating me to the point that virtually every Facebook visitation seemed more negative than positive.
You’d think after five years I would have bent to the whims of Zuckerberg and friends but I didn’t. The more Facebook changed, the less I enjoyed the experience.
Since you find in life what you look for, and I was looking for things that bugged me, I noticed more annoying ads cluttering each page and more recurring ads tracking my visits. I noticed less I cared about. In mid-January I concluded the Facebook experience was a bad “ROTI” — Return On Time Invested.
I am acutely aware of how my waking hours pass and concluded the time arrived to jump back over to the quiet, private side of the fence. I rid myself of the banging pots and pans of the Facebook symphony.
On January 31st, I quit cold turkey. Two weeks later I learned I had violated Facebook protocol because I did not give advance warning to my “friends” (which I was told I was supposed to do) that I was dropping off.
I shrugged off the chiding. Most of life is unannounced and Facebook is no different.
I planned to stop for a month, experience the detox process, and write about it. I’m six weeks gone now, heading into the seventh, and I miss it a little but not a lot. Twelve friends have reached out to see how I am doing. It’s been nice to hear from them. My other 500 friends have yet to notice.
I shall not lie: The first few days after leaving were difficult. When you are accustomed to habitually clicking a button to parachute into a digital picnic, and do so repeatedly throughout the day, stopping such a simple, lazy habit takes effort and policing. But time quickly diminishes that reflexive “check in” urge.
The second week gone is easier than the first, the third week easier than the second. By the end of February—when I originally planned to return to Facebook—I realized that I didn’t miss the site enough to rejoin the fray. I had replaced low-ROTI Facebook time with activities that yielded a better, more satisfying return.
The extra time away also provided more time to further process the behavioral experience. This series ended up more robust than I originally expected. The more I learned the deeper I wanted to go. At the core of the Facebook detox experience was my desire to help others who are over their heads in Facebook involvement understand how they got that way and how to get their lives back in better balance.
Having navigated the withdrawal experience I concluded that Facebook is neither a white-hat good guy or a black-hat bad guy. Facebook straddles both. Facebook wears a gray hat.
The site has its pluses and minuses. Like all digital tools it is best used to fill specific, well-defined needs rather than mummifying someone inside cobwebs of wasted time.
Today I decided to revisit the list of 21 reasons people are attracted to the site and sift through them one-by-one to better understand what the nature of Facebook’s allure was to me. The list also helped me identify what I have missed most. All of us will have different lists.
Rating each element based on its appeal to me as low, medium, or high, here is what I came up with:
1) Minimal Effort Catch-Up. Medium. Facebook might be too simple. I am startled by how many people with nothing going on insist on repeatedly proving it. Even more startling is what some people choose to share. The Internet is forever. A lot of keyboard jockeys haven’t yet figured that out.
2) Lets Us Share Controlled Information With Many Simultaneously. High. I work for myself and write books and movies. Facebook is great for disseminating updates on what’s going on. I valued this a lot and, quite frankly, miss it. I will not Tweet, which forces a functioning brain to act like an ambulance trying to parallel park.
3) Appeals To The Info Junkie In All Of Us. Low. Couldn’t care less for the most part, unless something important or significant is happening in the life of a true friend. None can help if they do not know.
4) Feeds Our Naturally Voyeuristic Natures. Low. I’m not a snoop and don’t much care for those who are. I am too busy living my own life to investigate how someone else is navigating his or hers.
5) A Forum For Egos. Medium. I have one — all former athletes do — and egos and strong wills are on ready display.
6) Fond Memories…In Retrospect. Low. I live in the present and not the past so I’ve forgotten more than I remember. I respect that memories are very important for many and all of need to cling to what matters most. I am too busy making stuff happen to look over my shoulder at things I cannot change.
7) Makes Us Feel Understood. Low. I gave up worrying about this when I was 25.
8) Family Contact. Low. I am close to those life has determined I should be. This was true before Facebook and it will be true way beyond Facebook being the answer to a trivia question.
9) My Mood Booster. Low. If I’m looking for some gun-toting idiot to irritate me, Facebook is nirvana. It has never been a mood booster as much as a head scratching conundrum of odd declarations.
10) Makes Us Feel Part of an Expansive, Exciting World. High. I have been tremendously fortunate to have traveled a lot of places, met and mingled with inspiring people, and learned from immersion in different cultures. The one thing I have missed most since leaving Facebook is being removed from some of these distant friends’ activities. They have played an important role in my life and I care for them. I miss the global connective aspect of what I had before.
11) Feeds The Essential Need For Human Connection. Low. I am a “connector” personality type, so I don’t need Zuckerberg’s engineers to decide how I should do it.
12) I’m Thinking About You But Don’t Want To Talk To You. Low. Personally, I’d rather have people call me on the telephone or email me. While I am a much more open book communicator than many, I respect enormously that timid personality types suppress the idea of connecting one-on-one.
13) Social Needs Fulfilled In Digital Form. Low. The key word in this one is “Fulfilled.” If it read “Supplemented” I would feel differently. Nothing beats in-person interaction. Digital curtains are, in my view, barriers to fulfillment.
14) Peer Pressure: I Can’t Miss Out. Medium. If you had asked me about this before I stopped using Facebook I would have rated it Low. Having now stopped, I underestimated this one. If something’s going on it’s fun to hear about it. This is Facebook’s Big Tease. Like finding something worthwhile at a flea market. Most of what you see is junk but sometimes you come across something that makes the trip worthwhile.
15) Friendship Quantified. Low. I used to think this was important but realize now stat is worthless. Facebook’s algorithms determine who you hear from and, frankly, I don’t much care for the algorithm. If it were up to me, different friends would populate my feed.
16) The Great Justification: “I’m not wasting time . . . this Is meaningful!” Low. This point is the big problem with so many of Facebook’s chronic users: They are great justifiers. Defenders of the inane, deniers of truth. I have yet to meet a regular Facebook user who does not know he or she is burning time helping to scribe what is, at its best, a digital tabloid.
17) Socializing + Gaming = An Irresistible Combination. Low. I wouldn’t waste four seconds on a digital game if you paid me.
18) How Do I Really Compare To Others? Low. By nature I root for all my friends to be happy and healthy. I cheer for them to be content with the lives they are living and to be positive forces in the universe. This is my pursuit and a busy, well-balanced life is a full-time job. We all have different gifts and I celebrate, not compare, those differences.
19) Facebook is a Boredom Buster. Medium. No question it helps kill time. If you do not insist on incorporating quiet time for the brain, this point is cha-ching city. I travel a lot and you cannot imagine how many people are totally incapable of passing time without their face in a gadget. Watching these people is sad. Very, very sad. They travel and see nothing. Learn nothing. Observe nothing. I pity these people. I despise the thought of living among them.
20) Insecurity Response. Low. This is never an issue for me and if it were I would seek human help, not the company of invisible others just as insecure or worse.
21) I Am Not Alone. Low. I have great friends. I know I am not alone. They know they are not either. The best way to have friends is to be one first. Loneliness is not solved in isolation staring at a screen.
Having sifted through the above list and thought through each of the 21 reasons, if I were to return to Facebook it would be under specific rules of engagement that enable me to get out of the site exactly what I want while spending as little time as possible to do so.
This is counter to Zuckerberg’s goal, which is to keep us on as long as possible so he can get out of us what he wants: data collection about us and our lives.
For now the Facebook door remains closed, but it is not locked. Should I reenter the fray it will be within the confines of predetermined rules, like on-and-off once each Sunday for fifteen minutes or less, specifically to catch up on life events and remain connected to those I miss.
Time will tell soon enough.