A Month Without Facebook

An experiment in making virtual reality actual

I read an article a little over a month ago: Facebook Use Predicts Decline in Happiness. This caught my attention, made me think about the hours I must be spending on that website, privy to the carefully selected and manufactured lives and times of people I know or organizations I’m interested in.

I could see the study’s premise being true. I’m generally on Facebook when I want to see what might be going on in other people’s lives in those minutes or even seconds in between other thoughts or activities. It almost seamlessly fills those idle moments with some amount of information. It’s almost too easy, especially with Facebook on one’s phone, to catch traces of other people and give yourself the feeling of connection with them.

But what was really going on? Was this feeling of connection actually connection, or some stand-in for the real thing? And was it actually doing us more harm than good? Just how far down the rabbit hole had I (and the rest of us) fallen?

I’m a self-described screen vegetarian. For games, TV, and movies, at least. Sure, there’s some tasty and nutritious things that are very much worth consuming, but I’m making a life choice to just cut the whole thing out entirely. It’s just not good for me, or good for society. It renders me completely useless at entire significant segments of small talk and pop culture trivia, but alas. There are worse things. What I get back is immeasurably better: time. Time to do things that matter in the analog world.

My vegetarianism extends to TV, movies, and games, but not to computers. While I’m not really in a position to take this line of thinking to its logical conclusion and join my grandmother in a computer-less existence, I do think that there are certain aspects of computers that can be eliminated for the betterment of all. And after reading that article, it became clear that Facebook was about to be put on the chopping block.

There is plenty of content there that’s worth taking in. There are thoughts and feelings and things of interest from people out there that I care about. There is occasionally a meaningful exchange of ideas. But the signal-to-noise ratio had gotten way off. That’s the promise of and trouble with a truly egalitarian platform such as the internet: the wizened sage, the commensurate performer, the reclusive iconoclast, the surly neighbor, and the village idiot all have the same volume megaphone. Lucky us.

So despite all the good, meaty stuff that’s worth knowing about and my active effort in blocking or hiding the stuff that wasn't, my screen was filled with stuff that just didn't matter to me. Facebook came to hold the same place in my life as TV. And that meant one very sure thing: time to shut it down.

Sometimes you don’t know how deeply ingrained something is into your day-to-day until it’s not there. It was only when I made the decision to go without Facebook that I realized just how habitual it was for me to quickly check my news feed. It was almost automatic, a fully learned and assimilated behavior: log on, check email, check Facebook. Take phone out of pocket, answer text message, check Facebook. Wake up, shower, dress, check Facebook.

How happy the Facebook execs and marketing team might be to hear this. You did it, you bastards.

Indeed, Facebook taps into things hardwired into the human psychological experience: the proclivity for social interaction,the capacity for third-person knowledge, and the histrionic desire to be heard and see one’s name in lights. All this, and in the medium that is most easy and increasingly popular for us first-worlders to access.

In short: psychological crack.

I didn't go completely cold turkey. There were some scant and errant tags and photos in which I was implicated in being a part of this corporate anti-privacy scheme. There were also work reasons for me to be more socially networked than I may have liked. But even with these occasional slips, the past month has been spent incredibly Facebook free.

I’m still here, still breathing, still doing things in the world, although the majority of my friends might not know it because I haven’t posted about it.

I have two observations from the experience:

1. It’s astounding how much people assume Facebook is being used.

Didn't you see my post? Didn't you get my event invite? Didn't you read my message? Wasn't that funny, what happened to them? That one video of cats? That one e-card? My status update?

Nope, sorry.

Luckily, I’m used to breaking the news to TV watchers that I have absolutely no idea what they’re talking about or referring to, so I could roll with this fairly easily. People still took it to be a personal affront that I wasn't up-to-the-minute informed about their latest and greatest.

Still, in the past month I know I missed out on the following news until someone bothered to mention it to me in person: two good friends got engaged (was a week late in congratulating them), one friend threw a housewarming party (missed it), another friend hosted a different party (missed that one too), my housemate invited me to a birthday camping trip (there’s still time).

Those were the big ones. I was totally oblivious until I got word in actual reality. I’m not sure what else I missed out on, but the fact that someone I literally cohabitate with invited me to something and I had no idea until someone else mentioned it in passing is troublesome.

2. Not using Facebook does improve your general happiness.

There’s some truth to the study that was published after all, at least in my experience. Because Facebook is such an easy way to direct your attention elsewhere or hang your sense of self-worth on a like or comment count, it keeps you from confronting actual reality, which is often much more difficult, messier, demanding, and unpredictable. In the short term, this is a boon. But over enough time, it wears you down, keeps you from accessing some very centrally human things that you need to check in with from time to time in order to be a functional person.

Facebook also gives you a lens through which to frame your experiences, and that lens is incredibly manufactured and premeditated. I’m sure that it even guides choices in experience and activity — I’m sure there are some folks out there who would admit to doing something precisely because it would be so cool to have that on their Facebook. Maybe a new profile picture, perhaps some comments, but at very least some likes.

This is backwards and wrong. When the tail starts wagging the dog, it’s time to learn some new tricks.

One end result of this is that people decreasingly have experiences for their own sake, and are not as present for those experiences. Think of the number of movies taken at concerts on phones, or the number of phones answered in the middle of something amazing. I don’t want to consume my reality over and over, and don’t want my present reality to be experienced through a screen, i don’t want to be distracted by something else that’s going on for someone else who isn’t there. I want to be in it completely, loud and sweaty and visceral.

The other end result of thinking and behavior of this kind is that people fill Facebook with a carefully curated set of information. By the nature of the medium, that information comes in very bite-sized, short attention span pieces. What the rest of us see is a sparse, one-dimensional mosaic that generally resembles a human being, but is really not at all a good representation of the nuance and complexity of humanity. We nevertheless take this crappy representation and run wild with it, comparing, competing, growing increasingly convinced that actual reality is as simple and concise as Facebook makes it out to be.

Happiness has a lot of variables attached to it, but in cutting out Facebook and giving myself enough time to allow it to be purged from my consciousness, I find that I’m more centered, more engaged with my internal states, more aware of the actual reality surrounding me, more aligned with the sort of life experience my five senses and brain were designed to have. Happier. It’s by no means perfect, there are still other blocks and obstacles on this path, but for now, it’s a big step in the right direction.

I’m not done with Facebook forever. I’ll check it again at some point. I’ll post a status update. I’ll comment, I’ll like, I’ll network. Even vegetarians sneak some bacon or sushi every now and again. But after this month, it’s going to be much different.