Today I clicked the button to entirely delete my Facebook account. A thing I didn’t know was that it at first will deactivate my account for 14 days until it will be removed entirely. I want to give you an insight into the process of living a facebook free life, or at least my attempt to fade into that world.
The ridiculous thing about it is I’m about five hours into starting the deletion process and I sort of feel overhelmed by the thought of missing out on things. I do know for a fact that prior to my deletion preparations I barely used Facebook at all. I did not enjoy consuming content peers linked me to or shared for the most part. But know that I cannot access it, the feeling of missing out increased after the sudden burst of relief faded away slowly.
I am about to leave a service that psychologically manipulated me (and everyone else) to start relying on their services or at least make me feel like I do. I can definitely tell that I increased checking other Social Media sites since I started the deletion. And I am aware that in the coming weeks my cravings to just log in and use the service will increase, even though I consciously know I do not have a specific reason to visit the site again. I prepared for this (and will tell you about how I did later on), yet here I am thinking about it.
I signed up for Facebook in 2009 when it was an innocent service that allowed me to connect with people I hung around with or used to go to class with. I did not see how much this website changed my internet usage. Tomorrow I will wake up and not be able to check Facebook for updates in the lives of my friends. I am 100% sure that none of my friends will actually post anything of relevance. Even if something happened, my close friends would let me know. I started a journey and now I have to figure out what friendship really does mean. People I didn’t talk to for years were part of my friendslist in Facebook. People I would hang out with almost everyday back when I was in school. I did not see or talk or even write a message to them in years, yet here I am worrying about missing out on former friends that actually are complete strangers to me nowadays.
I do not need to worry about missing out. I prepared. I made sure to have a way of communication with every of my actual friends. I saved the birthdays of my peers onto my calendar. I probably will know if somebody important in my life has birthday way more accurately since I did not check Facebook everyday (or even when I did I sometimes just checked if there were new messages). My music project has more followers on my website/blog than it ever had on my social media feeds combined. I need to rearrange my perception of my technological and real life since Facebook seems to have changed it more than I was aware of.
If you ever went through the process of deleting your Facebook account, do you have any tips, recommendations or stories to share? If so, feel free to write me a comment or e-mail.
Writer's Funk 