The world did not end.
I did go through some physical withdrawal, anxiety mostly, but after a few days that was gone.
I still have some lingering emotional symptoms. Certain circumstances make me want to reach for it again, but the urge passes pretty quickly.
It’s been a little more than a week since I decided to unFacebook myself. It was not as bad as quitting smoking, but it was a bit uncomfortable.
The day after I quit, I was having lunch at the Cruisin’ Cafe. I had never been. I ordered fish and chips having heard they had the best in town. The haddock was beautiful, the crust crispy and light, the tartar homemade, the fries golden and perfectly seasoned, the coleslaw fresh and delicious.
I involuntarily reached for my phone to take a picture and post it. I realized there was a time, not that long ago that I could simply enjoy my lunch without feeling the compulsion to share it.
A few days later, as I was driving home from work, there was a dramatic bank of cumulonimbus clouds bursting out of the horizon. Again, my first instinct was to pull over and share the view on Facebook.
I can remember making fun of tourists who spend all their time taking video instead of being in the moment. It’s kind of like missing your vacation so you can live it vicariously later.
Even as I’ve been writing this column, it has been creeping into my mind that I need to share it with my Facebook friends once it is publish. I have to kind of LOL at that.
In any event, I managed to quit, but I couldn’t go cold turkey. When I wrote my final post, it took me awhile to click the button and it included a caveat that I didn’t know if it would be forever. And I didn’t delete my account, I just set my privacy settings at the strictest possible level, logged out and uninstalled the mobile app from my phone.
That is somewhat akin to crushing the rest of the cigarettes in your last pack. You’ve stopped yourself from smoking those ones, but you haven’t stopped all the convenience stores from selling them.
Then, something kind of creepy happened. After about a week, I started getting emails from Facebook telling me about all the stuff I was missing, wondering where I’ve been, like an algorithmic stalker of sorts.
It was enough to make me think it might be time to permanently delete my account. I couldn’t do it, though. At least not yet. As one of my Facebook friends, one of my cousins, pointed out, there is a federal election coming up and I may need the forum to campaign against the HarperCons, the worst Canadian government in my lifetime and probably history.
Still, I am not ruling out full deletion. When I deactivated my account, Facebook required that I tell them why I’m leaving. I tried to skip that step, but the company doesn’t allow it. That’s right, you cannot deactivate your account without giving Facebook another opportunity to try to mildly bully you into staying.
I am also not ruling out going back. As another friend mentioned, an alternative to quitting is self-regulation. I admit that I had become an excessive user. It is very liberating to step away from it.
There have been studies that suggest social media may be having the opposite effect of its intention, that it is making us lonely. In the cacophany of newsfeeds and notifications and tweets we are losing real human contact.
I cannot say that that is my personal experience, but what it did do was create a lot of unnecessary noise in my life. What I am discovering is that about 90 per cent of what I got out of it, I simply do not miss.
Furthermore, I am already noticing I have more time for more edifying activities and that the information I am consuming is becoming less self-confirming.
If I do go back, I will not have it on my phone. There are few things important enough that I need to know about them in real time and we have other technology for that anyway.
The bottom line is: There is life after Facebook. Maybe there will be life with Facebook again, but right now I am actually enjoying my liberty.
