Anti-addiction
I’m going to be #OnHere a lot less.
The “I’m quitting Facebook” blog post has been written a thousand times, but everyone has their own spin. Mine isn’t noble. It’s all about my failures of self-discipline.
My reasons are probably not like most quitters. I don’t hate the site. I don’t feel jealous or unhappy from looking at other people’s pictures — at least not that I can consciously tell. I’m not spending hours a day scrolling through my news feed. But . . . you can look at that ‘ole fourth dimension more than one way. In one sense, it is just one damn minute after another. But, you can also think of it as segments of activity strung together. Here’s the meat of the issue.
A contiguous half an hour each day spent on Facebook is not necessary thirty minutes well spent, but maybe it’s OK. That’s not how I use Facebook, and it’s probably not how you use it either. I pick it up for one or three or five minutes in the midst of other activities. These little interruptions hurt my focus on and enjoyment of whatever they intrude on. Depending on when I indulge, that can mean less focus at work, or less involvement with my family, or even just less time spent at quiet peace while walking around town. That has to stop.
Oh, yeah, and the academic community has given us some troubling research about social networks. There’s no smoking gun that I’m aware of yet, but there are dark clouds around this technology. Beware of that correlation and causation thing, but the research I’ve seen has a ring of truth.
So why not just stop using Facebook that way? Why not delete the app and only check it in the late evening after the boy is in bed? Can’t I just consolidate all that social network-y-ness into one block of time and optimize my day? I know some people with self-discipline, and it sounds like it would be a real nice thing to have. I tried deleting the app a month ago, but I found myself working around: logging in on my phone’s web browser, or taking more “rest breaks” at work. I find, if I don’t kill every single instance of a habit, it ends up reestablishing itself in my life.
Decision made, then. I’ve called myself to action. I’ve logged out of Facebook on all my browsers. I’ve removed the app from my phone. I’ve disabled all the email notifications. And it’s my intention to log in no more often than once a week, if that. I’m going to keep my account as a vehicle for posting pictures, and I’ll use this blog to post some of the things I might otherwise have put up as status messages. But that’s as far as it will go, assuming my discipline holds out.
Everything I just said also goes, maybe even more so, for Twitter. The trade-offs are different, but the effect is the same, and I’ve taken the same steps to fix the problem. I have to avoid networks where I personally tend to fall into a semi-addictive feedback loop.
Going forward, I intend to use my Instagram as my only online social network. I’ve tried using it a few times before, and it never really stuck. That makes it a good candidate for a network I won’t have an addictive relationship with. But it’ll be on probation. If it becomes a problem, I may just need to leave the social networking game entirely.
