What I learned from my 30 day Facebook Fast

It’s been about 30 days since I began my Facebook fast. It was an interesting and very revealing self-imposed challenge. I thought I’d share with you some of the things I learned from my time away:

For some time, I’ve been feeling the need to separate myself from my time on social media. God kept whispering in my ear, “you’re spending more time on Facebook than you are with Me” and He was right! I was. I admit it. I was a total Facebook addict. Almost every day since we moved away from our old home, Facebook became my first love. I had no friends here and since my surgery, I’d felt so isolated and alone. Spending time on Facebook was my way of staying connected. Every morning, I’d get up, get showered and dressed, fix my breakfast and walk into my office. I’d sit down at my computer and pour over the news feed catching up on all of my “friends” lives. Looking at their photos, I felt connected and a part of what was going on with them. Many of my friends were distant relatives or old high school buddies and Facebook was a way to stay in touch. 

The first week of my challenge, I found myself having to fight the urge to pull up Facebook on my computer or cell phone. I wanted so badly to know what was going on in the lives of my friends and family. I had a huge FOMO (fear of missing out). It took a lot of willpower to resist the urge to cheat, but I did it. I began to focus spending more time reading my Bible. I’d always read it and had a devotional every day, but I began to dig in a little deeper and spend a lot more time doing Greek and Hebrew word studies. 

The second week of my challenge was still difficult. While I was feeling totally socially deprived, as I had in the first week of the challenge, I continually felt drawn to the computer with a desire to check in. It was like a magnet…whenever I went into my office, it was as if my computer was pulling me over to it. I fought against it and found other things to keep me busy making it through the second week. My time with the Lord was becoming longer and longer. I stopped watching the clock and just spent as much time as I needed with Him each day. As I began to draw closer to Him, He began to draw closer to me. I was embarrassed at how much time I’d been wasting on Facebook each day and had to confess it and ask for forgiveness.  

The third week, I barely thought about Facebook at all. I had found lots of empty free time in my schedule now that I wasn’t focusing on checking my Facebook page several times a day. I began completing craft projects I’d had on hold and I began some new ones. I even decided to learn some new jewelry making techniques and have fallen in love with Kumihimo (Japanese braiding).

My fourth week away, I never thought about Facebook at all! I was perfectly content with all the free time I had and enjoyed filling it up with things I love. Occasionally, my husband would share something he’d read on Facebook but I didn’t really absorb it. I just shook my head and said, “oh really?”

So what did I learn from my challenge to leave Facebook for 30 days?

I learned that Facebook is a time thief, if you let it, it will steal precious minutes from your day.

I was dumbfounded by the amount of time I found in my days after leaving Facebook. I was also amazed at how quickly time slips away while you sit in front of the computer going through the newsfeed. One minute it would be 9:00 a.m. and then the next time I’d check the clock it was noon! Time just seemed to slip away so effortlessly.

     Facebook communication is a lot of white noise.

When I dropped Facebook, I noticed that the volume of communication in my life dropped significantly. But even so, I didn’t really feel a drop in the level of significant and meaningful communication. What I seemed to lose was mostly a lot static noise. 

Generally speaking, communicating via Facebook is a shallow experience. You read streams of brief messages from a variety of people, but the messages don’t contain much depth. Most are trivial and mundane. Some are clever or witty. Very little of the information you digest on Facebook is memorable and life-changing. Facebook can still give you a feeling of being connected but the long-term benefits are negligible.

Facebook essentially gives you the emotional sense that you’re doing something worthwhile (i.e. connecting with people), but when you step back and look at your actions and results from a more objective perspective, it becomes clear that you’re really just spinning your wheels and doing nothing.

Consequently, when I left Facebook, I let go of a lot of trivial communication, but I didn't have the sense that anything truly valuable had been lost. In fact, when I got back on Facebook after my thirty day absence, I didn’t have a single desire to scroll back through the news feed to catch up on what I’d missed!

      Impulse sharing comes with a price, think before you post.

In the weeks after quitting Facebook, I still felt the urge to share certain things with my online “friends”. I’d have a clever thought and feel, I should post this. Or I’d take a really cool photo and think, I ought to share this. In the past I’d have shared those tidbits out of habit. Then I’d check back in later and read through a few dozen comments people left. And there would be a little emotional reward in having that sense of connection.

But without the option to impulse-share during the past 30 days, I allowed those feelings to come and go without acting on them. I noticed that there was a consequence to sharing in real-time. I wasn’t being very present in the moment. While things were happening around me, I was off thinking about my online friends and what I might wish to share with them.

When I stopped acting on the desire to impulse-share, I become more present in what I was doing at the moment. Instead of being distracted by thoughts of connecting with people at a distance, I did a better job of connecting with the people right in front of me. I felt more immersed in my experiences. It was a subtle change at first, but it felt good!

Even after 30 days, the desire to impulse-share is still there, but it’s growing fainter, replaced by a growing desire to “be in the here and now,” fully present in what’s going on in front of me. I still like sharing, but it’s better to do so thoughtfully instead of impulsively.

     Friends lose their individuality and become part of a collective.

Facebook compacts so much communication into a single stream, and this can have a depersonalizing effect. As I continued to use Facebook, I gradually began thinking of my online friends as a network, a stream, or a big blob, as opposed to valuing each person as a unique individual.

When I’d post a status update, who was the intended recipient? Which friend was I updating? In truth I wasn’t sharing with anyone in particular. I was simply sharing with the collective. If I posted something on a friend’s wall, I wasn’t just communicating with that friend. I was communicating with their friends too.

One thing that surprised me was just how few of my Facebook friends I actually missed when I left the service. It was difficult to think of my old Facebook friends as individuals. They were all just part of the collective whole. When I unplugged from the collective, it wasn’t like I’d lost any individual friends. Dropping Facebook wasn’t at all like disconnecting from hundreds of individual friends. I didn’t miss anyone in particular because my Facebook experience was like connecting with a collective. I noticed the absence of the collective when I left, but I didn’t miss it per se.

The exception is that if I knew specific Facebook friends from real life, meaning that we’d met in person and had at least one good conversation together, then I could still see them as individuals. But I don’t need Facebook to stay in touch with those people anyway, so I didn’t feel like I was losing any of these connections by dropping Facebook.

      Facebook creates a false and unsatisfying sense of socializing.

I’m somewhere between an introvert and an extrovert. As a child I was very extroverted. I enjoyed being with others and around others. As I aged, however, I gradually became more introverted. After my breast cancer surgery, I became extremely introverted. I avoided face to face social contact as much as possible because my self esteem was at the lowest point ever.

It’s said that you’re an introvert if you recharge your batteries while being alone, and you’re an extrovert if you recharge in the company of others. Being active on Facebook had the effect of filling my social bucket. But it was essentially a false fill, like drinking salt water instead of fresh water. Instead of providing a real sense of connection that satisfies, it made me think I was out there being social, but I’d still be “hungry” afterwards. Facebook activity could never recharge my batteries in the way that face to face interaction could. But since I avoided face to face connections now, it helped me stay in touch. 

Facebook is computer interaction, not human interaction.
The reality of using Facebook is that you’re just typing and viewing insignificant bits of information on a digital device. You can call it social networking, but it’s not really a social experience if you’re actually alone sitting at a computer. Real socialization is face to face. A virtual ***hug*** isn’t a real hug. A smiley face icon isn’t a real smile. All you’re doing is pushing buttons. It's not reality.

A friend isn’t necessarily a “friend”.
I can be friendly with people from all walks of life, but when it comes to which people are most compatible as my long-term friends, the Facebook pool isn’t a good fit for the kinds of lasting friendships I really wish to cultivate.

Most of my Facebook “friends” wouldn’t have been very compatible as in-person friends. We wouldn’t have had enough in common to develop a particularly deep friendship, and the interactions would have been too unbalanced. So it seems odd to refer to them as friends in the same way I’d refer to my in-person friends. It would be much better to refer to them as acquaintances.

Facebook is ruled by addicts.
This is probably obvious, but the Facebook “friends” that you’ll interact with most frequently will tend to be those who are the most addicted. They post more status updates and comments because they spend a lot of time glued to Facebook. So you end up giving the most attention to those who are the greatest addicts.

Facebook is lazy socialization.
Social networking makes it easy to become socially lazy. With a few clicks, you can delude yourself into thinking you have an active social life. But is that the real story? Are you enjoying some intelligent face time with these friends? Or are you merely exchanging witty banter? Do you deeply value these friendships? Are you having the social experiences you desire? Or are you just wasting time clicking and typing and telling yourself you’re being social? What else could you be doing instead of social networking?

It’s a good idea to pause and take a look at your social results. Has social networking transformed your life for the better? Has it helped bring empowering relationships, valuable contacts, and intelligent mentors into your life? Or does it leave you drifting in a sea of social drifters?

I found that spending more time on Facebook didn’t produce much value for me socially. I did make some interesting contacts now and then, but it wasn’t worth the time spent.
     
It was definitely worth it to step away for 30 days!
If you have any doubts about your own Facebook usage, I highly recommend you try a 30-day Facebook fast. It’s easy to do this because Facebook lets you (temporarily or permanently) deactivate your account without deleting your data. So if you decide you want to go back to using it later, you can always log back in again, and everything can be restored with a few clicks, including your wall, photos, etc. As for the how-to, all you do is login to your Facebook account, and click Account -> Account Settings. Then at the bottom of that page, click “deactivate.” Follow the instructions from there. This won’t delete your data, but it will take your profile offline. You’ll become invisible on the service. To restore it later, just login again and click a similar link to bring it back.

If you really want to stay in touch with certain people from Facebook who don’t already have an alternate means of contacting you, you can send them a private message before you deactivate your account to let them know how to reach you during your hiatus.

I’m so thankful I did this challenge. In my case it was obvious within a few days that the benefits I got from using it weren’t worth the effort, but there were other subtleties I didn’t notice until weeks later.

The 30 day fast helped me realize that my time is valuable and precious to me. It also helped me realize I needed to re-prioritize things in my life and instead of spending hours and hours a day on the internet, I needed to shift my focus to living in the here and now. I needed to concentrate more on my spiritual life and less on the social media network.

When I signed back in, for the first time in 30 days, the post I placed on my wall was a tad bit facetious. I said, “I’m back! Did I miss anything?” I knew when I posted it that I hadn’t really missed anything important. Sure I may have missed seeing some cute photos or quippy posts but other than that, I’m sure there was nothing major that I’d missed.

Now that I’ve refocused, I’ll check my Facebook page once or maybe twice a day but I surely won’t sit in front of my computer for hours on end scrolling through the news feed. I can’t believe I ever did that in the first place, but like I said before, right after surgery I became extremely introverted. I had no social interaction at all other than with my husband and my children so Facebook did fill a void for me.

It’s funny, but somehow I feel as if I’ve taken my life back. I feel empowered that I can choose to keep things in my life private instead of sharing every little detail on Facebook. Now, when I’m out shooting, I don’t take a photo and think immediately, “oooh, I have to post this!” And when I travel, I don’t have to tell all of my Facebook friends where I’m going and what I’m doing. In the past, I would have shared the information in a sort of braggadocios way…”hey guys, look where I am! Look what I’m doing! Aren’t you jealous???” (Well, I never really used those words but in essence, that’s what my posts were saying.

It amazes me that so many people spend so much time on Facebook every day. What did they do before Mark Zuckerberg had the idea to create Facebook back in 2004? How did Facebook become such a phenomenon? Will people ever tire of it? Will something new come along to take its place? Why do we feel such a need to snoop into other people’s lives? Why do we feel a need to keep up with the Joneses? Why do we feel let down if no one comments on our posts?

There are so many Facebook addicts out there, are you one of them? Would you admit it to anyone other than yourself? How does it make you feel to know you give Facebook so much power over your life? Could you break away from it for a period of thirty days and have the will power not to check it even once? I challenge you to consider taking a break. You may not want to do a full thirty days, but how about a week? Could you handle 7 days without Facebook? Try it and be amazed at what you find out about yourself during your sabbatical. I did it and I’m so glad I did.