When I quit Facebook, my social word deflated a couple of notches. Invites for birthdays, mass messages for future group trips, novelesque catchups messages from friends across the world, and even random wall posts to hang out were big pieces of my social calendar. I still had my friends, but my methods of maintaining communication with them drastically changed. People still ask me either why did I quit Facebook or why am I not on it? I had it for 7 years and it has eternalized a chunk of my life digitally. It is such a great platform for keeping in contact with people, but it comes with some caveats I wasn’t sure I wanted to glaze over.

I’m a part of Generation Y, towards the middle of the years it encompasses. Thus, I remember what life was like before the Internet was mainstream. That was back when public libraries served as Dr. Google, and I had to learn the Dewey Decimal System to extract books from intimidating shelves to read and research for school projects. I remember when smartphones were nonexistent, and you had to rely on people being where they said they were at a given time. I remember learning how to speak to my friends’ parents because when I called their households, sometimes they were the gatekeepers I had to speak to first on the landline. So leaving Facebook wasn’t that hard for me because I carried on well without it before.

Engaging with the Tangible

What I did notice after I started counting my days clean from the social networking service, was that it was harder for my friends to accept my breakup from it than it was for me. I became some sort of inconvenience in a way: someone who required extra effort since they had to text or email me—or call heaven forbid. And I won’t deny that I have a love-hate relationship with phone calls because let’s be honest, texting is way easier. Phone calls require more work, but they tend to have more depth and tone; they are more rewarding, I think. Anyhow, I’m sure that additional effort has left me out of quite a few events or plans, but at the end of the day, I found that I had more free time. I write more now and read more news articles instead of scrolling through news feed stories from a big portion of people who don’t really matter to me. I do check my Gmail a little more incessantly. I guess it’s my new social fix as I look forward to communication from friends spending a summer in Bangladesh or friends who send me their writing for opinions.

I didn’t spend loads of time on Facebook at once so much as it was an easy way to fill up snippets of time throughout the day, especially while I was waiting for something. Now I engage more with those around me, unless they’re glued to their phone, of course. And it doesn’t mean I’m running up and blabbing on with complete strangers left and right, but I’m allowing myself to be in tune to those around me. I’m opening myself up to being available to a conversation, or to catch the smile of someone attractive walking by, or just looking at what people are doing around me and seeing how they’re responding to the world in return. Instead of looking to the digital world for my social fix, I keep to the more tangible one. Or at least one that has more inherent honesty to it. It’s not as easy to see through the filters in the digital world and the staged pictures where everyone looks like they’re having so much fun. The lives people lead on social media need to be taken as a grain of salt. That was something I had to get over because Facebook had a way of making me feel bad about my life. And I have a good life. One should never compare their circumstances to someone else’s because it can’t work. Things turn out differently for everyone. But Facebook makes it so easy to see the highlights of the great things going on in other people’s lives: the engagements, the babies, the fabulous trips all over the world, the fun-looking reunions. We have to remember that they are just that, highlights. They don’t encompass the full scope of someone’s life. They don’t include the downs or the hard work and planning that was involved to get that one perfect picture or the fights before the breakup. Social media‘s truths are inherently skewed because it’s based on what a person wants to share with the world.

Life Continues

Even knowing that, in a way, our digital lives are a lie—or rather they’re the abridged version of our lives, I still miss Facebook. Not Facebook per se, but its functionality in this age of global citizenship. I pretty much work to travel and thus have found myself with good friends sprinkled across the world. Facebook is such a great tool to remain connected to those people I can’t easily communicate with or see, but therein lies the trap of the social network. It makes everything easy. It’s easy to feel like you know a person’s life by perusing their wall and sifting through several pictures. In your mind, you can rationalize that you don’t have to pick up the phone and call them to check in and see how their life is actually going. Facebook provided me with the security that even though I hadn’t talked to a person in a year, I felt “caught up” with them by skimming their updates and check-ins. It made me feel as if I were not irrelevant because knowing that life is going to go on with or without you for a lot of people is an interesting pill to swallow. Now I have to pick up the phone and talk to my friends—much to their shock sometimes. Even though the circle of people I regularly keep in contact with has been whittled down, it’s the people that are the most important to my life. And I feel that we have great conversations on the phone because they are rich with news. Everything is fair game to discuss and dissect as something new because I wasn’t primed with info from their profile.

The Hidden Cost

There’s this notion that Facebook is not free because its users provide it plenty of data for it to mine and also serve as a base springboard to display ads and trending stories. Despite that commercialism, they are an amazing platform because they’ve positioned themselves as one of the main communication channels in people’s lives. The true price to Facebook isn’t that though; it’s your time. The next time you pick up your phone and get that rush of dopamine for getting a Facebook notification, think about investing more time in being connected to where you are at the moment, especially if you’re out with friends. I don’t think everyone should quit Facebook, but I think they should evaluate their relationship with it. As you grow older, it’s not the tags or check-ins you’ll remember, but how your friends made you feel when you were hanging out with them. And you can’t be in tune to that if you’re giving so much of your attention to your social media platforms.