In the last couple of days, I deleted the Pocket app from my phone and deactivated my Facebook account. Pocket was becoming a borderline addiction — I’ve always been an avid article reader and Pocket was a major enabler. It was really getting in the way of my New Year’s resolution to read fewer articles and more books. More importantly, it was partly tied up with my decision to take a break from Facebook.
Facebook is harder to explain.
Reasons that did NOT motivate me to deactivate my Facebook account
It’s a major time sink.
This wasn’t my problem. I would say I spend less than 30 minutes a day on Facebook. I probably spend more time pooping, but I find time for that. I can find time for Facebook. Overwhelmingly I post from Pocket or Feedly while reading (since overwhelmingly I post links to things I’m reading).
It’s nothing but vacuous comments about the coffee your friends are drinking.
Actually, no. Either because my friends are different or the Facebook algorithm effectively removes coffee posts, my friends post about art, writing, politics. Some of the most interesting discussions I’ve had about writing took place on Facebook. Politics too. In fact, it is the intelligence of my friends’ posts and comments that have kept me on Facebook so long.
It’s an echo chamber that self-selects for like-minded people.
No again. My Facebook friends are diverse. They include young and old, rich and poor, lots of people with high school degrees and plenty with doctorates. They aren’t, I will say, very racially diverse, but they include atheists, Christians, Buddhists, pagans and Jews (no Moslems that I know of). They represent a pretty good range of sexual preference and even gender identity. I don’t think there are any current military, but they include pacifists and plenty of ex-military, including one who is both ex-military (Marine in Iraq) and pacifist. For that matter, they include people who have been arrested and people who do the arresting, law enforcement and defense lawyers.
If there is a second thing I am grateful for, in addition to the intelligence of my Facebook friends, it is the diversity of my Facebook friends and in particular my thoughtful, conservative friends who take the time to argue intelligently with me. Sometimes I change my mind, but more importantly they show everyone that we can still have civil debate without civil war in America and that being a conservative does not mean being a “wacko bird” (as McCain famously said of Ted Cruz).
So why am I on hiatus?
This is thornier, but it has to do with a few things that may or may not resonate.
First, and least importantly, there are the curated lives we tend to put on Facebook. I have become increasingly uncomfortable with the way we present ourselves on social media. This is why for quite some time now my posts have been almost nothing but articles. I don’t want to talk about my feelings, positive or negative, on Facebook. Beyond that, I don’t necessarily even agree with all the articles I post. I find them interesting.
It’s not that I want my friends to have bad lives or feel sad or be stuck in a negative place. It’s more that I know they often are in those places, and yet I would never know it from Facebook. So I sometimes feel more out of touch than ever.
Truthfully, though, the distorted biographies we build on social media are not the main thing. If it were just that, the conversations about art and writing and politics would be worth it. It’s primarily two things: the time it takes and the brain it makes.
Not how much time, but what time
I said at the outset that Facebook doesn’t take up much time. That is true. The problem is the time it takes. I have spent an inordinate amount of time in my life alone in a room with books and something to write with. I’ve spent a whole bunch more time walking in the mountains and forests alone. Despite how some people see me, I am by most measures a strong introvert despite being “a talker” as they say. I’ve always been good at using that alone time to sit down at a hard problem and stay with it until it’s done.
I’ve rarely been bored because when left alone with nothing to do, my mind takes me to unexpected places — sometimes negative places like a bad record on skip, sometimes interesting places I’ve never been before. The key point is that my mind (everyone’s mind I think), fills in the spaces.
The more I thought about the role those few minutes a day of Facebook play, the more I realized that though only 30 minutes — often less, sometimes more — those are the crucial 30 minutes. Ideas and insights usually come from the mind’s effort to fill those spaces. But not if Facebook fills them. It’s too easy at the first sign of impending boredom to fill that gap with Facebook.
In fact, it’s hard not to. Originally I planned to simply stay off Facebook for a month. I couldn’t do it. I ended up lucky to make it three days without checking in. Why? That’s hard to explain, but it doesn’t really matter why. The important point is that I could not not check. That dependency intervened when it was time for my mind to wander.
Of course not all ideas are good. In fact, the vast majority are bad, some very bad. But as Seth Godin says (from memory): “If someone tells you they don’t have any good ideas, ask them how many bad ideas they have.” So I decided I wanted to leave more space for ideas, good and bad. I do not want Facebook filling in the spaces where ideas are born.
People used to be surprised that I didn’t own a television. They would volunteer statements like “sometimes I’m too tired to read” and I would suggest those would be good times to sleep. Since the invention of Facebook, people are rarely surprised that I don’t have a TV (and in fact, now I do, though it doesn’t get a broadcast signal and our internet is too sucky to stream, so it remains a semi-conscious choice to watch something).
Now that there are so many ways to fill the spaces, more and more people don’t even have time for television. And that’s not because they are so busy having earnest conversations with their families and friends.
It is much the same with the hard work of sticking to a problem. The biggest challenge to solving most problems isn’t that the problem is hard. It’s that other things are easy.
Facebook is easy. It’s a place to go when a problem seems too hard. Once I’ve gone there, even for a few minutes, I find the road back to the hard problem can be long and difficult.
The Sally Fields Problem
I’m glad that “you like me, right now, you like me.” It’s nice to be liked, or even receive likes, but more and more I feel that I prefer not to subject myself to the daily exercise in operant conditioning that is the Facebook system of likes and shares.
In college when I wrote a paper that I knew was a last-minute all-night dash that was not my best. I got an A. My first response was to take that as a sign that the entire grading system was bankrupt and meaningless (I’ve tempered my views on this somewhat after reading a few hundred undergrad papers and learning what the general standard is). My first book, I will be honest, I opened as soon as it came in the mail. My second book, I picked up at the mailbox and brought home and forgot to open. A day or two later, Theresa asked what that package was.
“I’m pretty sure it’s my new book.”
“Aren’t you going to open it?”
“I already know what it says.”
Don’t get me wrong. I think my second and even more so my third volumes of the Consistory registers are really good. I was a bit disappointed with volume I, though the reviews were fantastic. I stepped it up on volume II, and felt like we really got it right on volume III. I’m proud of that work. But the reviews were no different than the reviews for volume I. As in college, that mostly gave me insight into book reviews.
In other words, for most of my life, I judged my output by my own measure. If the reviews for volume III had been bad, I am sure I would have been hurt, but I would have known they were wrong. Facebook encourages me to judge my output by some other measure — did it get a response? Did it get likes?
It’s hard to give up the Pocket + Facebook habit. Sometimes I want to share something because it feels important and I want the world to know. Once I go down that road, everything starts to feel important and everything can’t be important. Or maybe the enlightened sage will tell me everything is important which means everything is important and I can’t possibly post everything.
That is the paradox of psychological math. The biggest difference is between zero and non-zero. Zero and infinity are cousins, maybe brothers. In other words, the closest thing to everything is nothing and since I can’t post everything, I choose to post nothing to Facebook. At least for a while. Maybe forever, which is a sibling problem. Never and forever are also cousins in a way that never and soon just aren’t.
Am I quitting forever?
I won’t say forever (or never). I deleted my account. It’s gone. But accounts are easy to create. If I feel like joining again, perhaps I will. That has always been my attitude toward eating meat. But since I quite eating meat in 1982, I have never felt like doing it again. I might change my mind tomorrow.
I have gotten a lot of pleasure from Facebook and have reconnected with at least five people I had not seen since I was 20 and, in three cases, have actually had the chance to see them again. And even people who live in the next town over are much easier to keep tabs on if I follow them on Facebook.
In the meantime, if we are/were friends on Facebook and you’ve found this, you know how to reach me.
Hi Tom, great writeup, and funny too. I can say I agree on almost all your points, even the reasons that did NOT lead you to leave FB. It´s true, the best ideas (or at least any ideas at all) come to your mind when you´re just doing nothing. So taking your smartphone to the toilet is a really bad idea!
Thanks Andreas for your comment which I think is funnier than anything in my post! At least nothing in my post made my laugh when I wrote it but your toilet quip made me laugh when I read it!
I agree with this, but then this could be said of anything people do to fill time gaps, not just FB. Why did you not write this before FB on the things you used to do to procrastinate or fill the gaps? TV, oversleeping, reading crap, watching stupid movies… FB is just one of the million. If you leave FB and then spend the time in one of the other million vices… we are in the same place.
Gahariet, I absolutely agree. I had the same thought running through my head as I wrote that, but it was long enough (or perhaps much too long) already.
If you go back to the first sentence, I say how at the same time I deleted Pocket from my phone. I read a lot of good articles on Pocket, but as you say, everything can be a distraction that moves you away from where you’re aiming. Getting rid of Facebook and Pocket were part of the same effort to realize a New Year’s Resolution to “read fewer articles and more books.”
As for television, I haven’t had broadcast TB in my entire adult life and still don’t. I also don’t have an internet service sufficient to let me stream via Netflix or Hulu. That said, I can and do buy DVDs and I can travel to places with more bandwidth and download a bunch of TV shows via Amazon Prime to watch later. That means that TV is a conscious choice that is typically “scheduled” (or planned anyway) with my wife. So TV, though a distraction, is a conscious distraction. Facebook was an unconscious distraction, something I would just do to fill in a gap, not as scheduled time, but filler time
The interesting thing is that since giving up Facebook, I find that in general I watch less TV, not more. I think this is a matter of reducing the habit of distraction.
I would agree that FB is a very instant gratification, maybe removing it may have an effect on how you manage your time and the things you get done. But it’s funny how people talk about Fb as if FB was the problem, rather than the problem being within oneself. If I have a lack of focus problem, removing FB won’t fix that problem. There is a myriad of things I can engage in to fill for that. I talk out of experience. I left FB 10 months ago… and I realize how I have not improved my productivity, because I watch Youtube videos, or I just read more news. So how to fix the CORE problem? That is a harder question with a harder solution that just remove everything like FB or Youtube. It’s funny how you find millions of pages of people saying how they life improved when they left FB… how many things they did.. to me it’s funny because if FB alone prevented them from doing those things… they are plainly suckers.
You seem to assume that
1. There is a CORE problem other than the problems I mentioned in my post.
2. That I was hoping to solve that core problem by giving up Pocket on my phone and Facebook entirely
Both of those assumptions are wrong.
Our lives are a collection of habits. I used to think somewhat as you seem to, but I have found over the last 20 years or so (I’m 53) that focusing on the core problem is best addressed by identifying the habits that lead you to a given behavior you would prefer to avoid or block you from the positive behavior you want encourage.
It may be that you want to work on something general (fitness, procrastination, depression, anger, who knows). So in that case, you have to know what general thing you’re trying to avoid or do. But then you have to identify the habits that stand in your way or encourage the behavior you would like to encourage. Little by little, you drop a few bad habits and add a few good ones and next thing you know, you are procrastinating less and exercising more.
I was not interested in any of that. With respect to Facebook, I was merely taking aim at a few subtle negative emotions that Facebook tended to encourage. With respect to Pocket, I simply wanted to spend more time on books and less time on articles.
It has largely been a success on both counts, but it hasn’t changed my life dramatically and I didn’t expect it to. It has changed my life subtly, one small habit at a time.
Now keep in mind, I was a light Facebook user and a heavy article reader. So giving up Facebook could only result in subtle change. If giving up Facebook were capable of creating huge changes in my life, then I would have to conclude that I had long ago given Facebook way too much control. Since I would never give Facebook that much control of my life, it is inconceivable that giving up Facebook would in fact result in large changes.
As for Pcket, reading articles, both online and print, isn’t something I gave up. I just gave that up on my phone and even then only Pocket. So again, I expected only subtle change, possibly not even noticeable and that is largely true.
I have noticed that I read books a bit more and I exercise a bit more. It’s not transformational, but it is a small nudge. If you’re looking for the huge life-altering change, then sell everything, quit your job, take a vow of silence and start walking around the world. That will result in radical change. But that was not my goal.
So in short, this was not about looking for big effects from small actions. This was about looking for subtle, specific effects from small actions.
If giving up Facebook simply leads you into more video gaming and television, that’s not really my problem. If that’s happening to you, then the first question is whether or not you want to watch more television. Let’s say that you wish you spent less time watching TV and more time reaching out to friends and family. Look for the triggers, the little things that prompt you to turn on the television. For example, perhaps you notice that when you have a beer, you like to turn on the television. Once you recognize the trigger, associate it with a new habit. For example, every time you crack a beer, call a friend or a family member.
You don’t need to figure out the CORE problem, if such a thing even exists. You need to figure out which habits make you happy.
Remember that turning on the television is an action and you can substitute another action. Procrastination is an abstraction, and you can’t really substitute another abstraction. Life doesn’t work that way.
Your case, fair enough, I was referring to what may be the case to other people. Let’s make this thing a bit more universal and less personal. Let’s not ignore the complexity of the human mind: in many cases it IS the case that there is a core underlying problem. Like with addiction, it’s not enough with removing nicotine or heroine off the sight of the patient, there must be a process and a therapy to undergo to get deeper into what drove the person to it in the first place, and the reasons are multidimensional and complex. Addiction doesn’t just go away by hiding or “turning off” heroine. If you take cocaine causally, that is not addiction, and the advice for those addicted will be no advice at all, because you are assuming that there never is a core problem and thereby you can fix their addiction by turning off their respective ways to exteriorize a much deeper problem. But if people (and they do) tell me that by turning off FB they finally managed to read that book, or learn certain skills, or get out more often… they are plainly lazy suckers. If FB alone prevented them from doing those things and there is no core problem with them… they are just lazy units with no will power… and must have their asses kick big time. And urgently.
Honestly, I have no clue what you’re talking about and this is the last time I’ll respond. First off, you keep responding to an article I didn’t write, didn’t want to write and wouldn’t want to even read. If you are so concerned about making it universal, please go be a creator and write something of your own. Put it up on Medium and drop a link here.
Second, who are you to decide who is a lazy sucker and who needs their asses kicked? Seriously. Live your life and worry less about whether I wrote the blog post you wanted me to write and whether or not Facebook was the core problem or a symptom or whether they are “lazy units with no will power.” If the topic rankles you so much, go out and create the article you wish I had written.
As I have explained at length, I personally have no interest in that article, in whether or not spending time on Facebook is or isn’t someone else’s “core” problem or any of that claptrap.
Great post, very personal.
(a) “I don’t want to talk about my feelings, positive or negative, on Facebook”. Why not? I think today we have different tools to externalise our feelings. It’s healthy to tell people about how you feel. Either another persona, a group, or the web.
(b) “I find that it’s so easy at the first sign of impending boredom to fill that gap with Facebook”. My very feelings! But FB will be replaced by something else. I left FB three years ago, and I know that I fill the gap by some other BS activity that fills that gap. On top of that, I have noticed that I am not up-to-date anymore in politics or philosophy or technology (I am actually forgetting all concepts in such fields). I also find that my writing skills are much poorer, and my quick-ness in answering and come up with responses has significantly slowed down. All because before I used to be very active in political and philosophical threads that require answering quickly. Now I don’t bother because I have no FB and I don’t go looking for them. FB was an easy way to engage.
(c) I would say that not owning a TV doesn’t mean much if you have Internet. The big challenge today would be not just remove FB off your life, but remove Internet off your life. Well, maybe that’s too much. How about not having Internet on your phone and house and having to of to the public library to check your emails (once a day or once a week). As long as you have Internet, you can fill the gaps by just checking the net (videos, articles, posts, photos, millions of things that are content-wise similar to what you would find on FB). So Internet is the issue, not FB.
Thanks for some excellent and insightful comments.
a) Why not? Because I don’t want to. I understand that people do want to. I’m just not one of those people. Now if you ask why I don’t want to, that’s a harder question. I suppose it’s just that with every step of abstraction, I have less desire to talk about feelings. So it’s easiest for me to talk about my negative feelings on a long walk in the woods with a friend. It’s harder on the telephone. Facebook is just not where I want to talk about my negative feelings. If I don’t talk about my negative feelings there, then I feel that talking about my positive feelings gives my friends a false sense of what’s actually happening. So in a sense, they would know less about me, not more. Does that make sense?
b) There is some truth to this. I am not sure that being up-to-date in politics is necessarily a good thing. I think it is good to be informed on matters about which you can take action. So knowing about a plane crash is completely worthless. Knowing about the key issues in an election is fundamental to civic participation. So I try to stay informed in ways that make me a good citizen and to focus my actions in a few areas (local infrastructure issues and climate change issues primarily). I have found that what fills Facebook time tends to be reading. I am reading more books since quitting Facebook and I find them to be so much more stimulating that most of what I got off Facebook. I just finished reading, back to back, Yuval Harari’s Sapiens (like everyone else) and Aldo Leopold’s incredible Sand County Almanac. Though written many decades apart, these two books go together very well and have given me a lot of food for thought and they have prompted me to sit quietly with a journal and set down some thoughts longhand in a more reflective way. The kernel of these thoughts often comes to me in moments of boredom, those five-minute spaces that I am no longer filling with Facebook. So for me, it’s a win. I would not say it’s a “change my life take over the world, understand the meaning of life change.” It’s just an “I enjoy this and feel better about how I spend my time and feel less stressed out” kind of change.
c) This is interesting. When I wrote that, I did not have unlimited internet. So for me to watch a TV show or even a YouTube video, I needed to buy a DVD or at least go to a cafe or something and download it to my Kindle Fire. Now we have slow, but unlimited internet available at our home and I find that we immediately started watching more television. Unlimited internet did, indeed, introduce the devil into the house. And now that I have unlimited internet, I find that you are exactly right – there are so many things other than FB to distract you with. So you are absolutely correct that having internet in the home is the Master Problem that outweighs all the others. Of course, my wife is a full-time remote worker from home and I run a small business from home. But if we were rich and didn’t have to make money, I have this idea that I would want to get rid of internet at home. I was thinking, just this morning, that when I get back home (currently evacuated due to fire actually), that I might try a rule where I can’t use my phone at home. I find using a computer is much more intentional. The phone is often more like Facebook: an unintentional distraction you turn to when you are bored. I will say that by removing Facebook, Twitter, Feedly, Pocket, etc from my phone, the temptation is much reduced. But as you say… still commonly a problem.
This response took me a while! :))
a) having a FB account does not mean you MUST talk about your feelings (negative or positive).
b) “I am reading more books since quitting Facebook and I find them to be so much more stimulating that most of what I got off Facebook”. Having a FB account does not prevent you from reading books. So maybe it’s a willpower issue (tempted by checking FB, so not having it is easier to bend the will).
c) Yes, Internet is a two-edge sword, but isn’t everything so? FB can be used for the best or worst. It depends on usage.
Said all this, it’s been over 4 years that I left FB, and did it with the intention to come back after two months… and look. :D Why have I not come back? Because I did not feel I needed it. But if I were to open an account, maybe I would start checking things again and see the utility.
At the end of the day, one can use the justifications they want to have or not have an account. Most of our decisions are irrational. You don’t want to have a FB account because you don’t want to. And that’s it. No need to rationalise it. I respect “not wanting to”. Be safe.