Quitting Facebook made me a happier, more productive individual

I made a Facebook account back in 2009 for a reason that, in retrospect, is really laughable: I wanted to play Pet Society. Back then, the hip site to be for teens my age was Friendster, and aside from “decorating” our profiles with bling CSS styles and setting up a Red Jumpsuit Apparatus background song, there really wasn’t much to do. See, at the time, there was no real concept of social networks. Friendster didn’t have a “wall” or “timeline”, and didn’t have chat functionality. Instead, we turned to other services — Multiply and Yahoo Messenger at the time — for those features.

Over the years Facebook has become a big part of my daily routine. First thing I’d do after breakfast each morning would be to check my account for notifications and messages. On breaks (and sometimes even work hours!) I’d idly scroll through my news feed, blissfully unaware that I’m actually wasting hours looking at memes and cat photos. And before I go to bed each night, I’d make sure to check my notifications and messages again just to make sure I don’t miss out on anything.

But recently, idle scrolling and before-bed browsing became detrimental to my well-being. With all the events happening around the world and in the Philippines, clashing points of view of vocal and often insensitive, bigoted people have become too stressful for me to look at, especially when these insensitive bigots are people I consider friends. I’d find myself angry, ears red and nostrils fuming, over a comment a friend of mine made on another friend’s post. I’d find myself getting so worked up about the caption a person I know put on an article they shared. For days, I’ve been finding myself angry and hateful — often as I get home late in the evening, after braving Manila’s hellish traffic and badly polluted thoroughfares — and so a few days ago I just realized that enough is enough. I wrote a post informing my friends of my hiatus with Facebook, telling them to go reach me through SMS or Twitter instead (I keep my Twitter feed relatively leaner — my following list is made up only of people I really know, or devs I like reading updates from), logged out from Facebook web, and uninstalled the Facebook and Messenger apps from my phone.

About four days in, I’m finding myself more productive at work and much happier overall. Here are some of the things I learned:

• I don’t need Facebook. Contrary to what a lot of people told me, I actually don’t need Facebook to stay updated about my real friends. People that actually matter found alternative means to keep me updated, and there are plenty of other messaging apps that don’t make me want to tear my hair out. Plus, the news outlets and personalities I follow on Facebook have other accounts somewhere else anyway.
• I spent so much time on Facebook that I didn’t really notice. About a week before I decided to quit Facebook, I installed a Chrome extension called Ultidash. One of its features is a site tracker, which as the name implies, tracks the time you spend looking at sites. To my surprise, I spent around 47% of my total tracked time on Facebook, and only about 30% on work-related sites like Github or StackOverflow. The remainder were categorized as “others”, which are probably random sites I found through Hacker News. This means that I spent a lot of time idle-scrolling through Facebook at work than actually looking at sites that I need. In my defense, the total time I spend on sites doesn’t really speak much about the time I spend at work, since I’m on VSCode or the terminal most of the time, but you get the picture.
• You’d feel a lot better if you just stopped giving a f*ck. Really. Part of what stressed me out about Facebook was that I cared too much about what people were saying. “Nooooo! That’s wrong!” I’d often think while reading what a random person wrote. As soon as I stopped paying too much attention to what people were saying (sometimes, about me), I found that I now have more time to focus on things that actually matter.
• Most importantly: Facebook is an addiction. Like a stick of cigarette, Facebook’s benefits are far outweighed by its adverse effects. Sure, I get to know more about more people and more stuff, but only a few people and only a few stuff really matter. As soon as I got rid of the idea that I need Facebook, I found myself finding alternatives to the functionalities it offered. My routine became leaner and more focused, only using apps and sites purely for the functionality that I need from them, and now, I no longer find myself scrolling through the news feed when all I really wanted to do was find that photo from 2011.

If, like me, you’re finding yourself stressed and distracted by Facebook, maybe it’s also time for you to let it go.