It’s no secret that Facebook has been increasingly problematic as time moves on, and the quality of the experience there has been trending fairly sharply downward for over a decade. But many of us hang on and feel like while we may realize we need to put less stock in the experiences we gather from that site, there’s still important conversations or connections to be maintained there. For many of the people I know, the quality of discourse and information exchange throughout the pandemic has really driven the unpleasant aspects home in an exceptionally strong way.

Just shy of two months ago while reflecting on these realities, I decided to conduct a personal experiment. It started off that I intended to avoid looking at Facebook unless I consciously decided there was something I wanted to check, and would limit myself to once per day at a maximum to encourage myself to be thoughtful about making that decision to open it. Accomplishing that to start with was difficult as Facebook was (as I’m sure is true for many of us) a fairly default thing to open and browse without thinking whenever I was bored or just not thinking specifically about what I was doing. I ended up blocking the site on my desktop computer, and moving the icon for the app to a different folder on my phone so that I had to consciously think about opening it, and forcing myself to go without entirely for three days to help break the habitual connection.

The surprises started not long after that. The first couple cold turkey days I found myself concerned about missing something important that needed attention and feeling somewhat worried. But when I opened Facebook and checked my notifications, I found that none of them were pressing and that most were just what I will term “Skinner box notifications” - extra notifications that Facebook pushes to you that don’t really have anything to do with you but get you to interact with the site and build that habitual link (think notifications that someone in your neighborhood posted for the first time, or that a group you haven’t looked at in 6 months had a new member, etc). After that realization, I found it easy to try another 3 days of Facebook abstinence, then another 7... The less I checked Facebook, the less I WANTED to check Facebook. In fact, thinking about the kinds of interactions common on Facebook from a disconnected position makes it seem like an unpleasant thing to do in general now.

Likewise without the urge to check Facebook regularly, I find I look at my phone much more infrequently, and it’s largely just a glorified iPod that can happen to receive texts and check the weather when I’m out of the house. That change has further driven home some of the unpleasant realities of modern smartphone usage that I’ve been increasingly aware of recently, but that’s another article altogether. Instead I find myself occupying breaks from work doing things like reaching for my guitar and getting some extra practice time in instead of trying to convince myself to practice.

Finally, as if perfectly timed to reinforce my findings and learnings over the last two months, I accidentally found myself opening Facebook last night while rearranging folders and icons. Almost immediately I read a post from someone I know that left my jimmies rustled and had me ready to start a diatribe on how problematic the opinions expressed therein were. I took a breath and had a moment of clarity and self awareness that I was about to jump right back into contributing to the forces that are tearing us apart as a society. I was letting that heightened emotional priming that Facebook exploits so well get me ready to engage in writing a response that, while it might make me feel momentarily better, would do little to change anyone’s mind, and might do a lot to prime their emotional responses and continue to fuel that destructive cycle.

Needless to say, at this point my desire to interact with that platform is at an all time low. I think I shall commit to keeping any interactions in the foreseeable future to trying to entice people I want to interact with to other options and platforms. I’m quite ready to say F-off to the big F.