I signed up on Facebook at least 12 years ago. It was wonderful compared to the other social media platforms available that time which were full of colourful animated ads everywhere. I remember I was wondering a few times in those early days “how the hell they make money to maintain the website” because at that time there were zero ads on Facebook.

I am not going to talk about the transformation Facebook went through over the last decade. That is not the idea behind this blog post. Over the past decade there were many times I wanted to reduce my time on Facebook, because I realised I was kind of addicted to Facebook.

• It was 2014, I was working part time & I wanted to stop checking Facebook while I was working. That time the main browser I used on my work laptop was Safari. So I decided to install an addon which allowed blocking websites. This worked perfectly well for me. I didn’t check Facebook on my work laptop there after. So the time I spent on Facebook while at work went to 0.

• Then after a few years I realised even though I don’t do infinite scroll on Facebook at work, I still check Facebook regularly from my phone (Facebook iOS app). Main driving factors for this were constant notifications I got for likes, comments for the posts. So to fix this I disabled all push notifications for my Facebook iOS app.

• Still I was not quite at a level I was satisfied with my interactions with Facebook. So after a few years, I deleted both Facebook & Messenger mobile apps from my mobile hoping it will end my addiction fully. For a few weeks yes, I was on Facebook only for a few minutes a day which was exactly what I wanted.

But after a few months I realised I started a new habit of accessing Facebook & scroll infinitely using my mobile browser. Yes I was not trapped by most of the iOS app awesome features, but the time I spent on Facebook mobile app past & using mobile browser were identical. So deleting the Facebook iOS app didn’t help either.

Let me explain why I wanted to reduce my Facebook usage. I signed up on Facebook to see my friends’ photos, make new friends. I believe “Face book” on the name Facebook explains exactly that. But over the past years I hardly saw photos of my friends in my newsfeed. Other than that I saw jokes, hate posts, political posts etc. Wake up everyday & the first thing we do is, open Facebook & start scrolling. For the jokes we laugh, for the political posts we feel satisfied if the political view aligned with mine. If not we disagree with it & at the same time trigger some anger. For hate posts, the anger we generate is even bigger. So we get out of bed in a bad mood & we carry this bad mood throughout the day & eventually it increases as hours pass by because you see more & more posts on Facebook throughout the day.

So this was the main reason I wanted to get rid of my scrolling habit on Facebook but at the same time I wanted to see my friends’ photos if there were any when I wanted to see them. Not when Facebook wants me to see them.

• After a few years of thinking whether I should delete Facebook or not, one day I decided I will unfollow everything on Facebook, so there will not be anything on my Facebook News Feed. It took me a few hours to do it. But believe it or not, the feeling after that was so good. The time I spent on Facebook went to 0 in no time because there was nothing for me to scroll. And I don’t wake up & open Facebook anymore. I don’t have bad moods for no reason.

So I highly recommend everyone to at least try unfollowing everyone on Facebook at once & see the difference. You don’t need to unfriend your friends. Your friends will not even know. You can always go to your friends’ profiles to see how they are doing. If you still want the news feed, you can always follow back. You will lose nothing by doing it.

Cheers,
DilumN