I’m Gonna Backpedal a Little on the things I said about Facebook, well, sort of . . .

Remember when I said those things about Facebook? Long term readers might remember this one. You might even recall that the time this past May when told everyone on Facebook that I was going away for a long while then I only logged off of Facebook for a week.

I am certain that nobody is actively tracking the ebbs and flows of my stance is on Facebook, but still I need to talk about my feelings pertaining to it. This is more for me than for anybody else. Maybe it talking about it here will spur further conversation about social media though, which is helpful for me (and maybe other people too?). It is kind of one of my favorite topics right now to think about.

By the way, in two days, on December 10th, my Facebook and Instagram accounts will be permanently deleted and I won’t be able to retrieve any of my information. I am excited. I can’t believe the mandated waiting period of 30 days to get my account deleted is almost up. It should be noted that my account won’t be completely deleted until up to 90 days from the day I selected Permanently Delete My Account. I will have to wait a bit longer for that date then.

During the first days after I quit Facebook almost a month ago, I kept watching Youtube videos with titles like “How to Quit Facebook” or “Why Should You Quit Facebook.” I was addicted. I wanted to know all of the ins and outs.

Many of the videos focused on the ways in which Facebook is tracking your usage on other apps. Some mentioned Facebook’s involvement in election meddling in 2016. They mentioned the spread of misinformation about political and health issues. Those are scary things for sure. I have probably been affected by those things on some level. Also I don’t love that Facebook is collecting information about its users even when the users are not on the app. It seems dishonest and unfair. I don’t like how pervasive it has become in our society. I don’t like how it is the de facto website for many companies. For example, the swimming pool that we belong only updates their only early weather closings on Facebook, not their website. I understand that it is easier to post a message on Facebook and user can quickly get notifications that a pool for example has posted something, but also I have a website and I know that it really isn’t that hard to update a website with information about closing early.

So all of those things are annoying and I could say and maybe have said that those are the reasons that I have quit Facebook. However . . .

My biggest reason for wanting to quit Facebook (and other social media) is that I am certain that social media has changed my brain. I know that I think about things differently now than I did before social media. When something happens in my life, even a small thing, I think to myself “how can I frame this narrative for an audience?” I see something in my house that my children did and I think to myself, “how can I take a picture of this and explain what is going on right now?“

I realized that I needed to quit when I was watching the A Closer Look segment of the show Late Night with Seth Meyers. Seth mentioned the testimony of Facebook whistle blower Francis Haugen who testified before Congress about the fact that Facebook knew how addictive their product was and were/ are working to make it even more addictive. Hearing about Francis Haugen’s testimony before congress made me realize that I was very rapped up in social media and Facebook as a product was being engineered in such a way to make me extremely addicted to it.

Sometimes when I thought about my need get likes on my social media posts, I thought about this one episode of the NBC comedy Community. The episode focuses on a fictional social networking application called Meow Meow Beenz. The study group becomes obsessed with receiving Meow Meow Beenz from each other and social class begin to form based on the number of Meow Meow Beenz they are awarded by others.

Here is a funny clip in case you want to see the highlights of the episode:

Before I quit Facebook, I used to get so wrapped up by the number of likes I received on Facebook and Instagram. I am kind of old, so I had fewer Instagram friends some of my other Instagram contacts. For me, it was commonplace to get like 6 or 9 likes when I posted something on Instagram. Younger people than me could easily generate 50 or 100 likes. You see, we Xennials aren’t on Instagram the same way that Millennials and Generation Z are or maybe I just did not have that many Instagram using Friends.

Also I would post links to pieces that I wrote for my blog and I would get way fewer likes for those posts than I would than posts I would put up that were pictures of my children. My children are good and all but all they would have to do was smile for a picture, not write something that took them hours to write. Cute children get tons of Meow Meow Beenz.

My husband pointed something out to me, he said really that if you don’t have children or pets, you are totally at a loss on social media for likes. Children and pets get all the likes.

I used to have a healthier relationship with social media.

I was kind on an early adopter to social media applications in that I started using Friendster (remember that one) way back in 2004 when I was a 24 year old. I also starting using MySpace around that time before any of my college friends were on the site. My only “friends” on the site were Tom, the guy who invented the site, and the people who I worked with at my Outdoor Education Camp. When my college friends, who were by then 25 and several years out of college, joined in 2006, I felt like they were infringing on my online world and I wasn’t completely onboard with sharing that space.

For all a long time, social media was an entertainment for me, and I felt like I kept my usage at a healthy level. I got a smart phone very late in the grand scheme of things in that I did not have one for the first time until 2017. Looking at Facebook only on computer until 2017 helped to keep my my usage of the site somewhat minimal. I remember a many year period of my life when I went on Facebook once a week or less.

In some ways though, I think motherhood is what pushed me over the edge. I knew that my friends and family wanted to see pictures of my children. I started to notice that showing pictures of my children got me many likes. I also joined several groups related to motherhood and children’s activities in my area and the people who I met through those circles became my world for a while. I started thinking a lot about things that people I hardly knew would say on Facebook. The things that people I hardly knew or only casually knew would stay in my brain and I would contemplate their viewpoints. I remember when one mother who I only knew a little complained about the amount of plastic stuff given out to kids. I debated about this in my head for a while. I started to feel guilty if I bought my children something at the Dollar Tree if I needed to go into that store to get something.

Other people’s thoughts and comments started to permeate my brain. Sometimes looking at Facebook or Instagram was the first thing that I did in the morning.

So What Does My Post-Facebook Life Look Like?

For starters, I have felt much more creative since quitting social media. I have felt like investing more time and energy in my blog than I have in some time. Also I have noticed that I have started taking fewer pictures. I still like to take pictures of my families adventures but it takes much more work for me to upload pictures to my blog, so need fewer shots (maybe better quality shots though, so that is something I can work on).

I know that I still use the internet way too much. Instead of looking at Facebook or Instagram in the morning, I look at the major headlines of the day on MSN or New York times. I find myself looking at celebrity gossip that I don’t really care about, so if I could quell that, that would be great.

In my non social media life, I believe that I have more long form thoughts. Fewer of my thoughts seem related to creating a quick sound bite so to speak.

In my non-Facebook life, I find myself I thinking about friends who I only kept in contact with on Facebook and I hope that they do not think that I have abandoned them (although I am almost certain this is not the case, my friends know how life works). I know that I will probably lose contact with some people because of my choice to leave. I also know that I have now severed the connection with some people who I don’t really know that well and whose voices maybe don’t belong in my head.

In my post Facebook like, I don’t have as much FOMO (fear of missing out) as I used to have. My fear of missing out has lessened because I am not aware of what I might be missing out on. For example, we had a very quiet Thanksgiving holiday. While in the past I might have felt weird about that but I did not feel weird because I was not on social media to see people getting together with large groups of family and friends. I liked our holiday. It reminded me of when I was a child and sometimes we might sometimes only spend a holiday with our nuclear family and it was often nice when we did that. Sometimes social media lead me to believe that if an event wasn’t a production, it didn’t count.

Even with everything that I just said, here is the part where I back pedal a little on my Facebook stance:

Here it is: I want you to feel free to share any of my posts on social media, if you want to, thought I am not saying “Hey share my posts.” I just want everyone to know that I am not anti-social media.

Some people quit social media to go off the grid. This isn’t why I did it. I crave connection but it feels right for me right now to be off of social media. Some people have a healthy relationship with social media where they can go on only once in a while and it is fun for them. It stopped being fun for me.

If you are one of my former friends from social media and want to send me a message by e-mailing Everydayadventureswithkatie@gmail.com I would love to hear from you or you can comment below if it moves you to do so.

Do you have a social media addiction? What are your feelings and experiences with social media? I would love to hear in the comment section.

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