My history with that site spans about nineteen years. I first got an account in 2006, when I started college. It was at that same time the site became open to people who weren't college students, so I unexpectedly found myself Facebook friends with my parents and with other adults and still-in-high-school friends from back home. I was living in New York City, making new friends, going to classes and events and exhibits, but I was frankly way too invested in what was going on back in Kellswater. I was thinking of myself as part of the social circle I'd been in before leaving, and I think Facebook is a large part of why I wasn't able to jump headfirst into a new experience. Why I was so tethered. 

I'm not interested in telling anyone else to quit the site. Not everyone has the difficulty with moderation that I do. I have a few friends with accounts who log on maybe twice a month, something I find unfathomable. In sharing my reasons, I'm in no way trying to convince anyone. But here's why I'm glad I got off of thefacebook: 

1. rage roulette 
This was the biggest impetus for deactivating. It was particularly bad with Reels (see #2) but it was coming up with posts as well, especially since more and more I was seeing posts in my timeline from random pages I didn't follow. When you're scrolling through dozens and dozens of people's Hot Takes and opinions designed for maximum engagement, you're going to see things that are infuriating. Every day I was seeing blatant racism, homophobia, transphobia, antisemitism, Islamophobia, xenophobia, and the kind of ignorance that literally costs lives. And on top of seeing this stuff and getting mad about it, I was seeing a layer of content on top of that from people saying "look at all this shit, look at it, don't stop looking! If you stop looking, you're a terrible person!" and that in itself was infuriating. I know that my setting up recurring payments to Doctors Without Borders and World Central Kitchen does more good than staring at video after video of horrible imagery without actually doing anything about it. But people who make their money from getting you to watch and engage with their videos are quite literally invested in convincing you that "paying attention" -- spending more time on social media -- is the only way to be a moral person. I was spending more and more time in a state of rage. I'm in my late thirties. I'm seeing peers drop dead from sudden heart attacks. I refuse to believe that killing myself by living in a constant state of impotent fury is more morally righteous than doing what I can and then stepping back. 

2. dopamine slot machine
A secondary issue was the amount of time wasted on endless scrolling, especially with Reels. I can still screw around online, on Reddit and on Youtube (where I long-ago turned off my watch history and now only look at a handful of channels). But it's not the endless chain of mini-rewards. It's not a struggle to pull myself away. I'm finding myself getting bored again, and that's a great thing. 

3. context collapse
I recently finished reading Amanda Ripley's High Conflict: Why We Get Trapped and How We Get Out. (This was at the insistence of my rabbi, who was probably also worried about me dropping dead from a sudden rage-induced heart attack.) It's a useful and thought-provoking book, I'd even say it's an important book. One particular line stood out to me, where the author is talking about how we need to communicate with people in a way they can hear, by speaking to their values. She says "is it manipulative to speak French when visiting France?" Code-switching is valid and necessary. It's not about being fake, it's about making sure the person you're talking to can receive the information you want to communicate. When I made a Facebook post, it was going out to all ~200 of my Facebook friends (theoretically; see #4). I wasn't able to communicate effectively because I had to speak in a universal language, the social equivalent of Esperanto. And linguists will tell you that conlangs are limited compared to natural languages. If I tried to get through to a right-leaning friend by addressing their concerns and values but still making my point, a left-leaning friend would see that and argue with me over my word choice. This isn't a criticism of the friend who took issue with my wording; it's a criticism of the platform that puts us all in a giant open cafeteria together.  

4. screaming into the void
Even though, in theory, a post with the audience set to "friends" was meant to be seen by everyone in my friends list, the reality is that only a few people would see a given post. Sometimes no one would see a post. I did some experiments and found that certain topics seem to get shadow-censored. Even doing algospeak to get around that (which I hate), I found that when I shared posts or videos, no one would react. I also noticed I never saw shared videos show up in my feed, even though friends were sharing them.
This all contributed to a feeling of constantly screaming into the void, which just isn't great. 

5. fake food
This brings me to the spoiler mentioned at the top. In the novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine, the main character joins a cult where many innocuous foods (like tomatoes, if I recall correctly) are deemed unclean. Cult members subsist on a specific brand of snack cake, because it's considered to be clean. Late in the novel, the character discovers the nutrition information for these cakes and finds that they have almost no calories. Everyone in the cult is slowly starving to death eating piles of these snack cakes.
Facebook felt to me like these five-calorie snack cakes. I'd feel a need for social connection, get on facebook, and feel as if I'd gotten some without actually gaining any nourishment. Maybe a little (those cakes do have five calories) but it wasn't a replacement for direct connection. I don't even necessarily mean in-person, either: there's a significant difference I feel between interacting on FB and exchanging a phone call, email, or even text. Maybe this doesn't hold true for everyone, but there's something about the specificity of reaching out via phone or email that feels more solid than interacting on the platform that algorithmically serves people up to you on a convenient platter. 

6. false binaries
There's a forced binary when you're on FB: you're either friends with someone or you're not. You can unfollow someone who's annoying you but whom you don't want to unfriend, but you're still designated friends. It forces you to clearly label someone as In or Out of your social network. (I know some other sites, like one of the ones Google attempted if I recall correctly, had different circles or layers of friendship. But I think this is the same problem, just made slightly more complicated.) Human relationships can be fluid and messy. Having to decide if every single person I met belonged in my digital village or not felt absurd. (I also was not facebook friends with my rabbi, with whom I have a fairly close relationship, because I was not sure I could handle the idea of my rabbi seeing my repost of a cake that looks like a twerking Edward Cullen with glittery ass cheeks.) There's also the sense that if you're Officially Friends with someone on a social media site, you endorse that person and all of their opinions and behavior. It puts you in the position of being expected to purity-test everyone you know, or get questions like "why are you still friends with --? Didn't you see they said --?" Give me some wiggle room for crying out loud. 

7. RSD and reality
Being off of facebook is also forcing me to directly confront my rejection-sensitive dysphoria. Sometimes I'll email someone and not hear back. Maybe because they're busy or they didn't see the email, maybe because they just don't have anything to say to me. Sometimes I'll call someone and they won't pick up. That's OK. But it's all too easy for me to imagine that someone secretly hates me. It's hard to explain this one, but it feels like without FB I have to sit with my RSD in a way that's healthier. Because if the only contact I have with someone is email/phone and I don't get a response, then I've just got silence to sit with instead of seeing their recent posts and trying to guess what's going on with them from that. Maybe this ties in to the sense of FB as a kind of fake social food, but it was preventing me from really sitting with a total absence of communication from someone. 

I'll be moving very far away from Gardenpath in the next year. This morning I found myself thinking what bad timing: how am I going to keep in touch with people? How am I going to make friends? How am I going to do anything? But then I remembered what college was like, looking at the posts of people back in Kellswater and feeling as if I were "keeping in touch." I wasn't keeping in touch; I was just looking backwards. And I know how much more it meant to me to get a series of emails from a friend of mine as he drove out west, just a few paragraphs describing the gas stations and motels he was stopping at, than it meant to see dozens of daily posts from people who weren't really talking to me. 

That's about all I have to say about that. I've got pumpkin pies to make.