I Quit Facebook for a Month and This Is What Happened

There’s a good chance you've had your fill of Facebook, the social media platform created by Mark Zuckerberg in 2004. Of course, the platform has evolved, adding features, targeted ads, and a lot of users — though that might be changing. Facebook whistleblower Frances Haugen gave thousands of internal documents to the media and testified before Congress last year about how the platform knew it was being used to spread misinformation and hate but tried to hide that evidence. Researchers had long been hearing of user discontent; in February, a report from parent company Meta showed that Facebook's daily active users had dropped for the first time. I joined the opt-out crowd and quit cold-turkey for a month. This is what I learned. (What do you think? Let us know in the comments.)

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Admittedly, my Facebook vacation had been in the works for a while before I closed the tab on my laptop. After slogging through what felt like an onslaught of political memes and angry screeds, I had already started thinning my friends list, and I didn’t post often — but I still scrolled through my feed on an almost nightly basis. I never cared much for Instagram and found Twitter to be a home for angry hot takes, so closing Facebook meant I was largely shutting down social media (with the exception of some occasional TikTok recipes). Granted, I was curious about what my IRL friends were up to. But when I started to feel that I was seeing more ads and memes than cute baby pictures, I decided it was time to take a break, at least for a while. 

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I had followed many of the tips suggested to help you sleep, including blackout curtains and even blue-light filtering glasses, but I still had one, sleep-robbing vice — scrolling through my Facebook feed before bedtime. While the change wasn’t immediate (I’m sure I kept myself awake wondering what I was missing), after a week or two I found myself drifting off to sleep sooner than I had been, and with less tossing and turning.

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Granted, the political climate, global warming, and a pandemic do not make for a relaxed state of mind. But turning to social media for support wasn’t the answer, either. Generic memes offering encouragement did nothing to take my mind off of current events, and plenty of people I knew posted about world problems or their own concerns, which only added to my list of worries. By eliminating doom scrolling, I felt better about life in general almost immediately. I also got a subscription to The New York Times online, so I didn’t worry about losing touch. 

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There has been a bevy of reports about how Facebook quietly sells access to companies hoping to sell you stuff, which has made the website and its stockholders very, very wealthy. Last year, the company brought in $118 billion, up more than 30% from the year before. While I’ve taken the steps outlined in Consumer Reports to make my information less accessible to the company, not going onto the site at all was a good next step to feeling like Meta wasn't taking advantage of my eagerness to watch cat videos. 

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I realized pretty quickly that I had come to rely on Facebook to remind me when a friend’s birthday was around the corner. But I also realized that using the app to offer a bland “Happy birthday!” wasn’t all that special anyway. I’ve added the birthdays of close friends to my phone and calendar, and have taken the time to call people to wish them well. The results have been far more satisfying.

I noticed that I no longer got updates from people and companies I followed on Facebook, which reduced the amount of sales messaging I had to sift through but silenced some voices I missed. It turned out that the solution was easy: Most offer weekly newsletters, and signing up was as easy as visiting a website.

Life as we knew it locking down in 2020 was a reminder that social media (and specifically Facebook) could be useful to check on friends and local COVID levels. But I didn’t learn much about local virus trends, and the personal information was scant. Despite my belief that Facebook would be a needed point of connection, I still felt I read more ads and slogged through too many reposted memes instead of finding actual information. It wasn’t worth it.

I didn’t see what some of my friends were up to while I was gone. I didn’t see pictures of their kids, their vacations, or their latest jobs. As a writer, I’m sure I missed good story ideas and useful sources, too.

Before leaving Facebook, I left a post inviting people to contact me via email and to let them know I probably wouldn’t be checking my Facebook account. I wound up reconnecting with friends I hadn’t spoken with in months. More importantly, no one blamed me for ditching Facebook, and several mentioned they were thinking about doing the same.

While I am reluctant to delete my account entirely, as I still have photos and messages I’d like to keep, my Facebook diet has largely stuck. Occasionally (once or twice a month, on average), I’ll open the site to see if there has been big news from a friend worth noting, but never stay more than 20 minutes — a big change from my nightly hourlong check-ins. I’m happy to say I don’t miss it, and I’m not sure what Facebook would have to do to lure me back. Maybe more cat videos ...