How to Quit Facebook and Instagram
On a redeye flight last week, I was trying to sleep as the woman in the seat next to me was scrolling through her timeline. Facebook, Instagram—it doesn’t matter which app. Having a glowing screen right within reading distance is irresistible! So, forgive me please, but I read over her shoulder and judged what she was posting.
From grammar to spelling to clarity, I was surprised to notice that her posts were practically unintelligble. Of course, I’m hardly one to brag. Last night I woke up from a nightmare, screaming in horror at the realization that my timeline was that vapid, too. I just didn’t notice because I was too busy being addicted. And so are you.
Quit to save your brain! Yes, YOU!
QUIT THIS FOOLISHNESS!!!
Social media is turning your brain to mush. Ever notice you can’t read anything longer than 300 words any more? And somehow all your creative writing goes into short, forgettable social media posts instead of really saying something? And by the way, if you don’t notice a general degradation in your thinking when you’re using social media, it’s possible you can’t even really judge. One of the first things to go is your ability to notice how surface your thinking has become. And none of that is coincidence.
It’s deliberate. Facebook founder Sean Hayes has even admitted that it’s deliberate. When developing Facebook, they read the latest brain science research. They figured out how to make Facebook explicitly addictive. BJ Fogg of Stanford’s “Captology” lab and Nir Eyal in his book Hooked then taught those principles to all of Silicon Valley, so they can addict (that’s you and me) and get us to click on ads and mindlessly buy stuff.
Addiction jolts your brain with pleasure juice brain. You see your friends’ pictures, along with their names, at irregular intervals. Sometimes they’re sharing headlines of articles that get you all steamed up. (The headlines, not the articles. The articles are often a disappointment.) The pictures, the names, and the headlines all give you a brain surge.
Since it’s at irregular intervals, that activates “intermittent reinforcement” and you get psychologically hooked. It’s why people play slot machines for hours in Las Vegas. Meaningless, bright, shiny stimulation plus intermittent payoffs equals time lost from your life. Forever.
While your brain is busy being addicted and cognitively impaired, the evidence is that Russian bots are then manipulating you. If you’re conservative, they feed you scare stories about liberals and immigrants. If you’re liberal, they feed you scare stories about guns and religion, and they try to sow divisiveness between liberal candidates.
The key to manipulation, whether it’s by ad companies or enemy psyops, is to bypass your higher brain functions and activate older brain structures. That’s why I didn’t realize how idiotic my own timeline was. The pictures and names had me feeling good, so when I read the vapid content, it felt good. The clickbait headlines got me feeling self-righteous, or curious, or angry, so by the time I read the vapid, poorly-written story (if I even bothered), I already felt like it was worth reading.
Quit for moral reasons
There are also moral reasons to quit. Even as I write this, another news story (the fifth or sixth in as many weeks) has come out showing that Facebook compromises privacy by silently giving preferred partners access to data that it claimed it wasn’t giving out. It secretly gave access to all your private messages, all of them, plus the ability to read and delete them, to Netflix, Amazon, and a few other partners.
And remember that Instagram and WhatsApp are owned by Facebook. So Instagram comes with all the psychological weapons to addict you, and WhatsApp increasingly has the convenient privacy invasions that let them use the records of who you’re calling, when, and how long you talk, to profile you for any possible reason they want.
Quit! I beg of you.
Quitting isn’t easy
Quitting isn’t easy. You need to create alternative systems to replace what Facebook does.
You need to create alternative systems to replace what Facebook does.
Without Facebook, socializing will take more effort. Your circle of friends will be smaller, but deeper. You’ll have to reach out.
Organizing events will get less convenient. You’ll have to think about your guest list. You’ll have to invite people by email or phone or text. In other words, personally.
Quitting has benefits
But your life will get better. You’ll start reading more than 300 words at a time. You might even read things all the way to the end. And learn more deeply from them.
You’ll start thinking your own thoughts, not just whatever clickbait, lies, and poorly-written dreck Facebook throws in front of you.
Which means you’ll also have to seek out real news, explicitly and thoughtfully.
In short, you’ll have to stop being a passive consumer of relationships and information.
Instead, you’ll be an active creator of relationships, knowledge, and, yes, your own self. Here are 6 steps that can help you get back there.
Step 1: Lurk. Only Lurk.
First, you must choose who you really value. This is hard. Facebook has made us lazy; we keep in touch with whomever the algorithm happens to show us. But those aren’t necessarily the friends who will make your life the richest.
Part of Facebook’s cognitive manipulation is that you feel like you’re keeping in touch. You aren’t. You’re just seeing pictures and names and imagining keeping in touch. Friendship is a two-way activity that happens in the moment. Emotions that creates strong bonds, like empathy, only happen face-to-face.
So stop interacting on Facebook, and start lurking. Set aside ten minutes and read your timeline, but read it asking the questions, “What parts of this are worth keeping in my life?” Pay particular attention to the people, the sources of news, the sources of entertainment, and the sources of education.
Stay as objective and non-judgemental for this part as you can.
Step 2: Make a List
Next, grab a piece of paper and title it, “What to keep!” Keep monitoring Facebook for a few days. Write down the names of everyone you’d like to keep in touch with. Also write down the names of publications and organizations that you want to continue engaging with.
This is hard. Facebook gives us the happy illusion that we can be good friends with a thousand people. We can’t. It gives us the illusion that we’re well-read and educated on topics we care about. We aren’t, necessarily. What actually crosses our timeline is what Facebook thinks we’ll click on, not what will actually improve our lives.
You’ll have to make real choices. That’s a good thing. It means you’re being deliberate about who you want in your life. About which news sources your trust. About what you want to learn, and from whom. About the kind of entertainment you’ll enjoy. In short, you’re being deliberate about who you want to be in the world, rather than leaving it up to “the algorithm.”
Step 3: Reach out!
Once you know what you want to keep in your life, start making it happen. Go down your list and send everyone a message on Facebook messenger: “I’m leaving Facebook and would very much like to stay in touch. Here is my contact info.” Give your phone number and email address. You can also call them and leave a voicemail (because who ever picks up their phone any more?)
Part of what you want to notice is who takes the time and effort to reach out and establish off-Facebook connection.
Take back your life and be the one creating it, instead of letting Facebook passively hand it to you.
If someone doesn’t, you need to carefully consider how much effort you want to put into that particular relationship. It’s not much more work to send an email or text message than it is to drop someone a message on Facebook. If your relationship with them isn’t important enough to them to switch to another app and type a personal message, that’s good to know. It should dispel once and for all this ridiculous notion that your Facebook connection represents any kind of real relationship. You can always keep putting in the effort from your end, but you’ll know the truth. And when the zombie apocalypse hits, you won’t feel too bad about throwing them to the zombies to buy time for you to escape.
Step 4: Use Facebook Local
When it comes to social gatherings, however, Facebook has changed the world. Many people organize events only using Facebook. By leaving Facebook, you risk being left out of your social circle. You kind of have to admire it. In only ten years, Facebook has managed to hijack the basic human activity of having real, in-person friends.
You can still access your Facebook events without addiction. Install the Facebook Local app on your smartphone. It lets you view just events. You can still receive and respond to invitations without touching the rest of the site.
You can also rebuild your off-Facebook communication lines. People survived for tens of thousands of years without Facebook, after all.
When you call or text the friends you are staying close to, ask them about upcoming events in your social circle. Indeed, you could even throw caution to the wind and organize your own event. A dinner. Or a movie. Or board games. Or rock climbing. You could send invitations via email or even call people. A old-fashioned indulgence in human contact that borders on scandalous!
Step 5: Choose & Check Your News Sources
Remember those news sources you identified, where you get your news? Subscribe to them directly. Then go visit their site on a regular basis. You have the time; it’s the time you used to spend on Facebook. When you go directly to high-quality, primary news sources, you also learn about whatever other issues they’re covering. So instead of your worldview being shaped by whatever things Facebook throws at you, you can look at a broader set of issues.
If you’re feeling super-adventurous, you can imitate adults of long-gone eras. Visit a couple of different sites so you get a broader world view. If you seek out knowledge, you might find it’s there. You might also find out that you’re wrong. Or that you’re right. But you’ll learn deliberately. But if you let knowledge find you, it’s popping up because Facebook thinks you’ll “engage.” So whatever it is, it’s likely to be extreme and one-sided.
Step 6: Pay to Post
Lastly, you may still need a way to post on Facebook, if it’s necessary for your business. Personally, I can’t even visit Facebook for a couple of minutes without getting sucked back in. If you need to post on Facebook for business reasons, you might want to have a virtual assistant do it. Using a service like Fancyhands.com or Fin.com or GetMagic.com, or hiring a dedicated virtual assistant, you can simply have them log into your account on your behalf and post what needs posting.
This is hard. With the rise of Facebook, those of us over 30 have largely dismantled the infrastructure we used to have to choose our friends, build intimacy, organize events, decide our news sources, and be members of a culture and responsible, educated citizens. Those of us under 30 have never known anything different. They may have never seen, and often can’t even imagine building and maintaining offline relationships.
Take back your life and be the one creating it, instead of letting Facebook passively hand it to you. Convenience isn’t worth it. Be the architect of your own life. Be the artist of your own relationships. And be the Arrrrrrr! of your own pirate ship. Lurk on your Facebook timeline to decide who to keep in touch with, what to learn, and how to stay informed. Then go establish offline systems to create the life you want, rather than the life someone else wants you to have.
I’m Stever Robbins. Follow GetItDoneGuy on Twitter and Facebook. If you’re an entrepreneur, self-employed or otherwise need to control your own time, Get-it-Done groups help you start finishing what’s important, and develop the habits you need to be hyper-productive. Learn more at SteverRobbins.
Work Less, Do More, and Have a Great Life!
About the Author
Stever Robbins was the host of the podcast Get-it-Done Guy from 2007 to 2019. He is a graduate of W. Edward Deming’s Total Quality Management training program and a Certified Master Trainer Elite of NLP. He holds an MBA from the Harvard Business School and a BS in Computer Sciences from MIT.
