I am just going to assume it is safe to say that if you are reading this you have a Facebook account.  Who doesn’t these days?  Pretty much every business, person, and pet has one.  Hearing that someone doesn’t have one is so rare that when we do hear it we are shocked.  Which brings me to today’s post, I have decided to leave Facebook behind and break away.  You know what?  It isn’t as easy as it sounds.  You would think that all you need to do is deactivate/delete your account.  In theory you are right, but before you can do that you have to take into account the pages you’ve created or websites you use with that login.  Which of course I do both, so that means no deactivating my account because I still need to get to these pages/websites.  But before I go into all that lets go back to why I decided to do this.

Recently I have started to notice that Facebook has become more of an irritation rather than a fun way to keep up with everyone.  It use to be so nice to see what people where doing; whether it was traveling, getting married, or having babies.  You got to be a part of things even if you couldn’t be there in person.  It started out this way but over the last year I would catch myself scrolling through my news feed just trying to see what people were saying but could rarely see these statuses because they were clouded by all the ads, game suggestions, sponsored likes and the shared photos from other pages.  It has become about the money versus the people.  Most of my feed has now resorted to people just reposting photos from other pages versus a status.  Then you add that most of the other social apps like Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest link to Facebook accounts so you then have to deal with all those posts on Facebook and if you use those apps on there as well.  It was so much over kill that I noticed I was getting more and more irritated each time I logged on to Facebook.  Every time I had to scroll past a sponsored ad or like I would just cringe.  You would think that if I noticed myself getting irritated that I would just stop checking but at that point it was part of the routine that I just couldn’t help myself.  I caught myself checking Facebook randomly without even really thinking about it on my phone; I would check it in the morning and all through the night.  It was like it was a habit or even an addiction.  I had to click the app and see what was going on.  I would say to myself something interesting has to be going on then I would click and find out that it was just e-cards and political posts over and over again.

I then began to notice that the app for the iPhone was acting weird it was showing me posts that were three days old which I had already seen.  Then I would get these random notifications that a friend was doing something somewhere in the city that I have no connection to.  It was becoming a thorn in my side and I was no longer getting anything from being logged on and that was when I decided I needed to take a step back.  I started with first saying  “I am not going to check Facebook for the rest of the evening”, then I would catch myself an hour later clicking the app on my phone during a commercial.  I tried this for a couple days failing each time and ending up back on the app.  I eventually got to a couple days ago where I decided to take the leap and delete the app from my phone.  Hopefully preventing me from accessing without thinking.  Honestly that was really liberating; it was like a weight had been lifted off my shoulders.  Who would have thought that something so simple would have that effect.  I do catch myself zombie like trying to go to the app but then realize the app is gone and put the phone down.

While I made it through the next few nights, and was very happy about that.  It was nice to not have it as part of the evening.  I do have to admit I did ended up checking Facebook the next morning approximately 13 hours after I deleted the app while at work.  I was not surprised at all that I hadn’t missed anything because that is exactly what happened I didn’t miss a thing, it was still all ads, sponsored likes, game requests and shared e-card pics.  I ended up checking a couple times throughout the day while at work out of habit but I quickly closed the tab and moved on.  Even as I write this post I will admit I looked this morning at Facebook after going almost 24 hours and it still is exactly the same and I am not missing things at all.  It is a bit easier to not check it, especially since I am seeing that there is nothing special going on.  People are still posting all the same things that I am just not interested in anymore.

Now at this point you are probably saying why not just delete you account and move on.  Which trust me I want to do, but I don’t think people realize how connected everything today has become to Facebook.  For me I manage my jobs page on Facebook; so in order to do this I have to be logged on as me so I can get to the admin page.  So I am bound to it through Facebook.  Then you have to think about all the other things that Facebook links to, like Pinterest.  My account is linked to Facebook.  Well I like Pinterest so if I get rid of Facebook will I loose my pins and have to start over?  Even Groupon & Living Social allow you to access their sites with Facebook login, well if you don’t have an account you can no longer access those things.  The other way that I have noticed the take over of Facebook has been through blog contests.  A lot of the contests that I have seen late require you to Like their page on Facebook in order to gain an entry in their contest.  In general even when I enjoyed Facebook I didn’t do those type of entries because I didn’t want to share all my Facebook information with the blog.  I have always thought about the fact that each time you use that login somewhere you are sharing that information.  We do it so easily these days that we begin to get blinded by how far Facebook’s reach has gone.

Now I am not against social media as a whole, I am a big lover of Twitter and Instagram.  I still use them daily but because they are only really focused on one to two things I find them easier to enjoy.  I don’t cringe or feel irritated about their content so it keeps me going back.  So how do you feel about Facebook these days?  Do you still love all the changes and find that it is a great site?  Or are you like me struggling with the choice to leave?  Leave me a comment and tell me your perspective!