Tell me Your Inspirational Story of Leaving Facebook

In My Humble Opinion
1

I’m so over it. I’ve been over it for a long time. Problem is I still have some pretty serious emotional investments - including connections I’ve made with some of you folks and other friends I would otherwise never connect with. As far as I can tell, Messenger is a 98% positive experience so I can keep Messenger.

Facebook? Worthless, distracting crap with the occasional feel-better replies when I bitch about my various chronic conditions. I’m tired of hearing people wail about their political pet peeve du joir and do nothing in their real lives to address the problems, and I am a hundred times more annoyed when I end up doing the same thing, to the point it makes me hate myself. I want to get on with my life. There is so much better shit I could be doing.

My weak points are:

  1. I work from home a lot currently, and I get lonely during the day. Sometimes I get very depressed and feel I need additional support.
  2. I’m always on my computer, whether I am doing it to write grants or write fiction, so it’s always a temptation.
  3. I have a rather large face to face social network now, but the relationships aren’t as deep as many of the relationships I have on Facebook. For years I lived a somewhat nomadic lifestyle, moving all the time, so internet friendships became my ‘‘home base.’’ I see the opportunity for this shift now that I am a homeowner settled down in my home state again, likely for good.

I don’t understand why I feel so lonely when I am such an introverted person who is exhausted by social interaction. I had five people over this weekend (two on one day, three on the other) and it damn near killed me. Yet I go nuts sitting with my own thoughts, and have come to crave the constant noise and distraction of social media, however empty it may be.

I’d love to hear stories of people who cut the cord and are glad they did. Tell me how you did it. Tell me how you restructured your life, and handled your free time, and dealt with the boredom and stir-crazy and loneliness. If you don’t understand why this is hard for me, then your advice is probably useless to me. Just be glad you’re not crazy and move along.

2

This is what you should focus on. You use facebook for a reason, to bitch about things in your life and to have people give you support. Then you complain when other bitch about things they want to bitch about.
Try just listening and offering support to others for a while. When I do that, I always get the feeling that my problems really aren’t that big, and I feel better that I helped others just a little.

3

My apologies for the misunderstanding. It is not my intent to minimize the suffering of others. The emotional investment is in being a support to my friends and receiving that support in return. I have a big network of friends who deal with chronic mental health conditions and other chronic conditions and we get each other through the day. Many of them are parents to young children which also keeps things in perspective. That’s the emotional investment. That is done largely through Messenger, though.

I’m tired of political grandstanding. I’m tired of seeing it, I’m tired of doing it. I’m tired of constant conflict over stupid shit. I am tired of reading about the actions of sociopaths on a daily basis. I have finite emotional resources and it is a complete waste of time for me to rant about social injustice on the internet instead of doing something about it. It distracts me from the things I care about most in the world, including my job writing grants, and my passion writing fiction that helps me address these big-picture issues. This is time I could be investing into more meaningful change.

I de-activated my account. I created a separate account for my IRL groups (my writer’s group and D&D group) but I don’t intend to use it for anything other than those groups.

I’m done. Hopefully someday I’ll be able to share an inspirational story about quitting Facebook.

4

Have you tried avoiding your Facebook news feed for a few days? It’s a hard habit to break, but taking a Facebook vacation or limiting yourself to one or two views per day can make a difference. When you get the urge to check it, do something else. When you get the urge to post, ask yourself if it’s really necessary.

The hope is that eventually you’ll get to a point where you don’t think about it all the time, but you’re not deleting your entire profile.

ETA: Congrats on de-activating. As you can see, I am not strong enough for that yet.

5

It’s hard! I’ve tried cutting back and still waste time so I decided to go cold turkey. I dunno what else to do. The instinct to share and attribute importance to every dumb shit idea that goes through my head is still remarkably strong.

One of my friends suggested I need to take more time for myself. ‘‘You can’t hug every cat.’’

I think it’s the opposite problem. Most of us need to take less time for ourselves. Our culture is so freaking narcissistic and I see no evidence that makes people happier. I am anything but happy stewing over my own problems. Is anyone? The happiest people I know are always focused on taking care of others.

I’m sure there are people who do just fine with Facebook in moderation, but my personality of wanting to fix every problem combined with a tendency toward oversensitivity and self-pity, it’s just not a good platform for me.

Also, I just have fewer spoons than ever lately. I want to waste as few spoons as possible on dumb bullshit.

6

You aren’t the only one who has decided Facebook is too much. I hang around internet spots where people have come to realize it makes them depressed. Someone once described it as everyday receiving one of those annual family Christmas cards (the ones where the writer provides a list of each family member’s accomplishments). Once a year you might be able to handle being reminded where you stand relative to your peers. But every day? It can be rough.

7

The only advice I can impart is to basically do what you are already doing. Whatever you try that reduces your stress level while upping your satisfaction level is the right thing to do.

I’ve curated my Facebook friends list and feed to include only that which does not stress me out, though I have become pretty good at letting opinions I do not agree with slide right over me. This does take practice, however. I already had that from a listserv I was on years ago, so I just put that experience in place with a new medium. I wanted to surround myself with people from that list who were doing the most constructive good, not people who spent their time shouting at others from their keyboards. It’s worked out remarkably well, and the people who were doing real good from that list are now my Facebook friends, even if on some other minor points we may not agree.

The Internet is an interesting place for introverts. Even introverts need some level of human interaction, though of course how much depends on that sliding scale of how introverted one is. In a way, it’s great, because there’s less pressure and less energy required than face-to-face interaction. In another way, it’s awful, because that very ‘one-step-removed’ feature takes the brakes off an awful lot of folks and makes them think they can say whatever they want with no repercussions. I’m sure you’ve heard of the Greater Internet Fuckwad Theory. There’s some people I know who I get along great with face-to-face who seem to have entirely different personalities online. It’s a blessing and a curse …

As with anything, I think you need to surround yourself most closely with people who lift you up and who you think you might be most able to count on when your back is to the wall. Who out there would be willing to come and get you if you found yourself in need of a ride in the middle of the night? Who could you call to help if you found yourself in the hospital and needed something? Cultivate those kind of relationships first, and I think you will feel happier overall.

You DO NOT feed Facebook, or any other online thing to fill up your time. One of the greatest things a fiction (or any other writer) can do is READ! Do that, and I think you will find being immersed in a great book, away from the world, will make a lot of stress fall away. And if you want to discuss books and literature, there’s a lot of ways to do that both IRL and online - and not just in one writer’s group. One of the best things I ever did for myself when I was ill/recovering from surgery was to find a great book series and READ. No Internet, no email, no TV. Just me and another world to dive into.

Exercise helps, too, if you can do that in a safe environment. Find a walking or hiking group that will get you outside and away from electronic things every day - just let them know about your medical condition and wear a medical alert bracelet so everyone knows what to do if something happens.

8

I installed a browser add-in (BlockSite) which, well, blocks websites that you tell it to block.

Of course it’s really just a speedbump since it’s only a minor hassle to unblock a site if you really want to see it, but just that small interruption is a helpful reminder that you were trying to take a sabbatical from certain sites.

9

This might be a silly suggestion, but it helped me a lot during the really bad time between being diagnosed with depression and finding a combo of meds that worked, and you mentioned D&D, so here goes.

Fantasy roleplaying games. Single-player ones, not MMORPGs because everyone who plays those is an asshole. For me they were engrossing/ooh-pretty enough to keep my mind occupied, plus if I was feeling pissy I could take it out on virtual people and just reload and play the nice guy later, and at times I would just wander through the landscapes or blast monsters to bits for a few hours.