Kicking the Habit: 30 Days without Facebook – Days 1 and 2

It is very hard to leave Facebook, not because it is hard to survive without constant social contact, because Facebook makes it hard.  Obviously they don’t make the “disable account” function easy to find, that’s just bad for business, and after a trip to the Facebook help page I finally managed to find the place where I disabled my account.  When you click disable it not only has the “are you sure?” command window, but it also takes you to an exit page, asking once again if you are really, really sure that you want to leave.   The top of the page told me that my friends will miss me on Facebook,  and then found a pictures of me and some of my Facebook friends with the caption “Joe Schmoe will miss you.” As I looked at the pictures of four of my acquaintances and my boyfriend, I was fairly certain that none of them would actually miss me.  Then I had to fill out a mandatory questionnaire about why I was leaving the site.  When I thought I was finally out and free, I immediately received an email explaining how I could reactivate my account if I so wished.  It was like breaking up with a boyfriend who just wouldn’t get the hint.

But after I jumped through all of the hoops and Facebook finally left me alone, I felt so much better.  Just knowing that I would be away from all of the drama of Facebook, at least for a little bit took a load off my mind.  Not to say that it cured my depression or anything, but it stopped making it worse. 

Of course I immediately started running into complications.  I didn’t have a lot of people’s contact information which made issues around selling and buying textbooks a little more difficult, and I found out later that old friends who were trying to reconnect with me because they were coming to visit couldn’t find me.  Perhaps the biggest problem came from the fact that I was now completely out of the loop when it came to university events.  Facebook is a way that most societies communicate with their members, and now I’m completely out of the loop.  I’ve had to get my boyfriend to go on Facebook to find information on a few events, which is probably cheating, but I got off Facebook so that I could get off the computer and see people in person, I need to know event times for that.

We’ll see how things go in the next few days. 

~Nice Girl