Last fall I deactivated my Facebook account and I haven’t been back since. I’m still not exactly sure what changed in me but I’m glad it changed. It has been a long time coming. Throughout the months leading up to my account’s final deactivation I had temporarily deactivated and reactivated it several times. I’m officially done with all social media timelines for the foreseeable future. I’m only on Gmail and Messenger. Messenger is useful because it’s linked to my Facebook account and it allows me to message all of my Facebook friends even though my Facebook account isn’t active. Since I live in China, I also need to have a WeChat account, and I do use that for texting friends but I never use it to post “moments” (the WeChat equivalent of status updates) on the Wechat timeline, and I don’t even look at what other people post on it.

For years, especially the years after I finished college, I spent a considerable amount of my daily life on Facebook, reading and sharing news articles, commenting, and mindlessly scrolling the newsfeed. I would login just to check what one friend was doing and then I would suddenly slip and scroll into a bottomless pit. These days I still keep up with the news, I’ve just lost the need to share it with hundreds of friends.

Where does that need to share come from? I constantly shared news articles because they were about issues that concerned me and I genuinely wanted more people to talk about them. In fact, I viewed my own role as a minor zeitgeist influencer. That’s not a grandiose delusion–we all contribute to our own social network’s marketplace of ideas, but not all of us take that role seriously. When you view your posts on Facebook with that kind of potential significance it can turn into a burden. Reading this, you may think it’s no wonder that I eventually got overwhelmed, considering the sheer number of issues to keep track of and bring to the public’s attention, but that wasn’t the only reason I left Facebook. When I think about it now, I boil it down to three main reasons.

1) Time wasting

This one is pretty self-explanatory so I don’t have much to elaborate on here. I will say that, as unnecessary as a lot of my activity on there was, I did read a LOT of informative articles, absorbing a great deal, and as futile as my debates with friends and strangers may have been, I feel like it developed a voice for me and sharpened my rhetorical tools.

2) Embarrassment

The public nature of every status, every comment, every like and angry reaction left me trying to examine all my activities through as many eyes as possible. How could I be misinterpreted here? I can’t like this because it’ll probably show up on this person’s newsfeed. I should edit that status. I should delete that comment before anyone replies. I should hide this status from that person. And so on. I’m already neurotic as it is. Having an extension of myself online that anyone could scrutinize and misunderstand at any hour of the day left me constantly feeling a subtle, creeping dread after almost every status I posted.

3) Narcissistic tendencies

The problem I feel most embarrassed about is the way Facebook infected my own way of thinking. More often than I care to admit I found myself having what I call Facebook fantasies. I would daydream about having some enviable experience (usually traveling somewhere exotic) and I imagined that experience through the lens of what it would look like to my friends on Facebook. Wouldn’t it be cool to travel to some place few American tourists dare to go? Maybe I’ll briefly befriend some armed group in a desert and they can point their guns at the camera and it’ll look all gritty and stylish, like a Vice Documentary. “Where ARE you, Jeremy?? Is that safe????” “How are you still alive??” “Great shot!” would just be the beginning of my deluge of comments and likes. Nobody would then deny that I’m definitely an interesting person worthy of attention. Whenever I realized I was having another Facebook fantasy like this I would immediately cringe and curse my own brain for being so ridiculous. Then after that I would curse Facebook.

It’s been months since I noticed having my last Facebook fantasy. Five months clean. I’m not sure at this point if I will ever go back. I already talk to my Facebook friends through Messenger and I get email updates on world news through my email. The irony isn’t lost on me that most of my three or four readers here on this blog are only aware of my updates because of a family member sharing them on Facebook, so I can’t fully hate Facebook, but sharing my blog posts isn’t enough reason to reactivate. The only reason I can imagine returning will be to post photos again. But even then, they’d have to be some extraordinary shots to compel me to walk back into the dark alleys of social media and contact my online like-dealers again. Maybe if I go to Somalia and spend a day or two taking selfies with some Kalashnikov toting pirates I’ll have to share those photos. That would be such a cool aesthetic for my online persona.