21 Weeks and Counting Without a Face(book)
I remember exactly where I was the day I received my invitation.
It was July 2006. I was attending a summer arts program at Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT.
At the time, Facebook was exclusive to college students. But for almost a year, high school students started to trickle in through invitations offered by those of us lucky to know someone in college. By summer 2006, it was “cool” to be on Facebook as a high school student.
I checked my email that morning in the computer lab. An invitation had arrived. Huzzah!
Like most social platforms, Facebook became increasinly useful as more people joined. Within a couple of months, Facebook opened its doors to anyone with an email address. Then things really took off. Everyone (sans parents, at that point) was on it.
And it was magical.
It was easy to navigate. Fun to use. Clean. Everything Myspace wasn’t.
Photo sharing was revolutionary. Facebook wasn’t the first photo sharing service, of course. But it made it easy — not only to upload photos but to share them with friends. I remember how much fun it was to upload albums and meticulously label every photo.
Facebook was the place to connect with people on the internet. In college, it was a must-have tool to get invited to parties and navigate social circles. It helped shape my college experience. Inside jokes from my fraternity brothers and sisters are scattered all over our timelines. Practically all of the memories from those years live somewhere on the site.
But some time over the past six years, a slow shift began to happen to my relationship with Facebook.
It went from magical to addictive.
And I started to notice a decline in my well being.
The verdict is not conclusive, but many studies have deduced that the more we use Facebook, the unhappier we become.
So what happened?
Before smart phones took off and the internet became ubiquitous, people had to sit down at a computer to use Facebook. Over the last five years, most of us have gotten reliable access to the internet in the palm of our hands. The barrier to entry for Facebook anytime, anywhere, was lowered.
In 2012, Facebook announced it was becoming a mobile-first company. A brilliant strategy — they knew where the future was headed.
As the company grew, it became increasingly focused on retaining users. Mark Zuckerberg has said that there are roughly 10,000 versions of Facebook running at any given time. Their engineers test out new features against a variety of metrics. Many — not all — of these metrics are around retention. How often are users coming back? How many minutes are spent per session?
It’s indisputable that notifications have been engineered to keep us coming back. I remember the days when notifications were used to inform us when there was something relevant to see. Nowadays, many notifications feel like spam— you can visit the site once an hour and get new notifications about events happening near you, pages you “might” like, or when a friend uploads a new profile photo.
From a purely economic perspective, this strategy makes perfect sense. Any for-profit company wants to attract and retain customers. Sean Parker, Facebook’s first president, recently admitted that from the company’s early days their goal was to “…consume as much of [our] time and conscious attention as possible.”
With this shift, Facebook changed from a place I went to connect with people to a place I visited when I was bored or feeling lonely.
I’d find myself opening the app to see how many likes my posts had received. Or, I’d frequently check on messages marked as “read” but not responded to. In an effort to reduce my usage I turned off push notifications and later deleted the Facebook app. But I still accessed it through my phone’s browser.
I began to subconsciously compare myself to others. Most people’s Facebook selves are deeply curated: we only see the positive aspects of others’ lives. I began to wonder if I was living a good-enough life. This only felt worse when logging in during a depressed mood.
After making these observations, I started to wean myself off of all of my social media accounts. I stopped visiting Facebook 25+ times a day and limited myself to one or two times daily.
I thought a lot about deleting everything entirely. But connectivity to the world and my friends prevented me from doing so. It was also the most useful place to promote my writing (from this Medium page!).
So instead, I decided to try a little experiment.
Cal Newport, in his book Deep Work, suggests taking 30 days off from social media to discover for yourself if the cons outweigh the pros. The rules are:
- Don’t formally deactivate your accounts
- Don’t go out of your way to mention to anyone that you’re not using them
When I logged back in to Facebook over a month later, I documented the experience:
It felt instantly familiar — like being home. Almost as if I’d never left….except for the fact that I had 89 notifications, two friend requests, three messages, and three posts from my mom on my timeline.
One of my 89 notifications was from Facebook, telling me 30 minutes prior that I hadn’t updated my profile in 5 weeks. Who cares? I’ll update it when I want to.
After the 30 day ban, Newport provides two questions to help determine next steps:
- Would the last thirty days have been notably better if I had been able to use this service?
- Did people care that I wasn’t using this service?
If the answer to both of these questions is no, Newport suggests quitting social media entirely.
So I came to the conclusion: These services no longer serve me anymore.
It took a couple more months, but I finally deactivated Facebook at the end of September 2017.
Since then, I’ve taken back control over how I spend my time. My attention span now has one less black-hole to deal with.
When I feel a surge of frustration or weariness at work, I no longer open up a new tab and launch Facebook to distract myself. Now, I’m forced to deal with the difficult emotions that come up — probably a more sustainable strategy.
During times of boredom — in the elevator at work, while in the checkout line at Trader Joe’s — I don’t blindly resort to Facebook to kill time. Instead, I focus on being present.
Now I pick up the phone and call my east coast friends to catch up, instead of relying on what they post on their timelines.
While I have no doubt that leaving was the right decision, it’s not all rainbows and butterflies.
Friends have to remember to email or text me to invite me to events — and I’ve undoubtedly missed things because of this. This Medium page’s viewership has taken a massive hit, since I can’t share my stories on Facebook anymore. And I’m out of the loop from the lives of friends outside of my immediate circle. Just yesterday someone asked if I had seen the photo of a mutual friend’s newborn. I admitted that I forgot that she was pregnant in the first place.
In the end, what I’ve gained from my time away from Facebook far exceeds the drawbacks.
Will I ever come back? Maybe. Mark Zuckerberg’s recent announcement gives me hope that the service will undergo some important philosophical changes:
Facebook has a lot of work to do — whether it’s protecting our community from abuse and hate, defending against interference by nation states, or making sure that time spent on Facebook is time well spent.
All important points. But the last part touches on why I left Facebook in the first place.
The time I found myself spending on Facebook was not time well spent. Most of it was time wasted.
