Thoughts on My Personal Relationship with Facebook

Three days ago I took a hiatus from Facebook. I’ve pruned my feed for the last couple of weeks to get rid of stories which were not serving me: mostly click-bait and shallow or funny videos and animated GIFs. These only create value for those who publish those but not for me. My attention is limited and every click or tap on one of those items will bring-in even more of those. Conveniently Facebook provides “Hide all from…” to remove those sources.

After a while I realized that Facebook isn’t giving me any value anymore. While I have people posting interesting news articles, personal insights or other sensible stuff in my feed, it didn’t feel it was serving me anymore. Because Facebook changed from a social platform to a news platform.

I like to be in the loop and know what happens in my friend’s lives, but most people are not writing about themselves but post stuff from the Internet. I do the same because there’s so much interesting and awesome stuff out there and our lives are boring in comparison. But my attention is too valuable. It’s hard to resist the temptation to read an article or engage and comment. I’m not acting proactively but reactively. And it costs way too much time and even more attention and therefore energy.

Whenever I detox from social media or Internet news I’m more relaxed, focused, and tend to create more instead of just semi-compulsively consuming things. I take less in so I can give more. The busyness subsides. I’m more in charge of my live. And it feels awesome.

I may use Facebook again some time in the future. Maybe after hiding most of the external content people are posting to limit my feed to their own thoughts and contributions.