In the last century, there have been various changes in modes of communication. We have travelled from letters to telephones to text messages to video calling, and it goes on and on, it gets faster and faster. Following these improvements, what backed up the most of these were the social networking sites which came into existence. One of these which emerged to be quite hype was Facebook. It was started in 2004, and has changed the way we communicate and present ourselves to the world outside. It took over US at first and then got global.
Facebook has more than 1.23 billion monthly active users. Although the initial bit was only to get people closer, it actually turned out to have many negative effects. In this article, we focus on the negative aspects of having an active Facebook account and how you can quit it. Let us first go through the reasons to quit Facebook, after which we will see how to quit and cope up.
Top reasons to quit facebook
Time consumption
The first and the foremost thing that bothers people with Facebook is that they don’t realize how much time they waste on it. Once they have wasted their time, they think that they could have utilized in a better way. When you are online, scrolling down the news feed, people don’t really check how much time they end up spending there. You get stuck onto a video or start a conversation or debate over a comment, and it just goes on and on. The time you spend on Facebook can be your free time, but that time could have had a better alternative. This is what we don’t tend to realize and just stick to the site. You could have spent some time to learn something or simply take a nap to get refreshed later.
It is demoralizing
When you see some people going on post about parties and celebrations, whereas you’re going through a hard time, you will surely feel bad. There are times when you feel connected to the 990 friends who are on your list, but there is no one actually with you. You feel lonely, and posts like these make you feel worse. If you’re own posts aren’t as good as the ones you see on the feed, you will surely feel depressed. However, these situations are circumstantial and you can react to it differently, if you get onto the brighter side of yours. Again, you get into the brighter side of your life when you go offline!
Coming across unproductive people
If you see somebody posting all the time, you’ve probably found someone who isn’t productive enough! Coming across people who have less constructive things to do, with their lives, will always be online. On the other hand, you add tons of people year after year, and there comes a time when you see excessive posts and messages, which don’t interest you. These are probably from the people who you don’t know well and you don’t want to keep a tab on. These increase your newsfeed and simply take more of your time when you scroll through. You might also come across people who constantly keep texting you, bothering you, and eventually take up more of your time.
Coming across useless information
Facebook is a panel where you get to read a lot of bizarre stories and go through a lot of information, which aren’t always real. Even if they are, they are usually not very important or informative. They can never replace a regular news channel or newspapers, and is usually overloaded with various comments and criticisms.
Spoils communication skills
Chatting with people continuously will not give you the actual feeling or socializing directly. On the other hand, it tends to worsen the communication skills as you reduce direct communication. Writing to someone is never as good as talking to that person in real. On top of this, many times, our texts tend to get misinterpreted, as we don’t read it in a way someone else does. This creates miscommunication and misunderstandings. It is always better to call or meet someone, especially when it is about something important.
Working on your posts
Once you create a socially acceptable personality in front of 1000s of people, they start to know you in a certain way. You want to match up to the posts which they like as that describes more of you. Facebook influences people’s creativity and you keep on sharing whatever you like. You want more and more likes on your posts and you start working on improving the acceptability. In reality, this isn’t a competition where you need to get promoted and you need to get better at. It still becomes an easy way of mental satisfaction, that the people around you are accepting you better!
Now privacy
Once you start posting everything on Facebook, your life becomes an open book. It is good to be an extrovert but nobody wants to know each and everything going on in your life. It is much better to keep some things just for the closest people to know. You might also want to keep things to yourself, which you’ve lately stopped because Facebook took over!
It becomes your life
There are times when you see that you have given in some much into an application, that it has become an important part of your life. You are addicted to it and you keep checking on it, like you check on a small baby! It has become so important to you that you don’t know what to do without it. At the end of the day, you have to ask yourself, if it is at all worth all of that? You spend more time with an artificial application which connects you to the world but takes you away from the people around you.
How to quit facebook?
If you have been convinced about the fact that Facebook has been a menace so far, and you want to resign from it, do it! Go onto the settings and deactivate the account. If you want it to be for a trial period only, you can also good ahead with that. Try it for a few days and see how it is going.
- Digital detox is a very important thing that we all should do from time to time. Staying away from social media and other apps which make us depended on the digital world, should be limited or kept switched off for some times.
- Initially it is going to be a little troublesome to let go of it all at once. If you think you can reduce the usage and keep it for the bare minimum, then you can simply delete the apps from your phone. Delete the Facebook and Messenger app and when you have free time, open it on your laptop. You don’t always have the energy to open a laptop just to log onto Facebook, so the access becomes less anyway.
- Deal with the withdrawal by getting into something more constructive. Take up an old hobby, concentrate on your household chores, pay more attention to the tasks that have to be completed, work on the things you have avoided for long, and the list will go on.
- When you switch off from social media and go for a complete digital detox, you start appreciating whatever you have around. Give more time to relationships, and get closer to the people by meeting them but not just sending a text.
- Keep the withdrawal slow, so that you don’t feel like starting it all over again.
- Remind yourself about the negative aspects, every time you get tempted again.
