I did a Facebook blackout for a week, and ended up completely forgetting about the place—it was wonderful!
As a writer/musician, it’s not realistic for me to delete my account and walk away permanently—90% of the Indiegogo fundraising we did for our Firstimers debut album came from our heroic FB contacts. In the future, I hope to be able to entice some my social media friends into reading my novel, if it ever gets published. I know some brilliant people on FB, whose opinions I value, and I don’t want to lose those connections.
But walking away for a week felt great. The first hour was the hardest, when my thumb automatically opened the FB app on my phone several times like some kind of Pavlovian ingrained behavior. So I shifted the app onto another screen, buried among unused apps, and immediately forgot about it.
After a few days, I started getting a lot of FB emails: So-and-so posted a picture, somebody else replied to an event, whatever—which tells me that the algorithm noticed that I was inactive and wanted to pull me back in. That felt like a tiny victory. The best part is, when the week was finally over, I forgot to log back in. The app was no longer in its usual place, and my thumb had broken the habit of tapping it. I’m a few days late with this summary because of that. For those of you struggling with (a) the addictive nature of Facebook, and/or (b) the collusion of Facebook with white supremacy, right wing politics, and conspiracy-mongering, I highly recommend a week-long cleanse. You can come back, we’ll still be there. Where else can we go?
