How I Survived a Year and a Half Without Facebook (And You Can Too!) Part 1

In October of 2011, I was fed up. I was sick of the Mafia-Zombie-Cloneville invites. I was sick of reading the inane and often poorly-written “updates” on the lives of those whose lifestyle consists primarily of updating Facebook. I was sick of the constant layout changes obviously implemented to copy Google+, or whoever the prevailing competitor was that month. I was sick of the awkwardness of “liking" ambiguous posts such as a thought-provoking and well-written news article about some utterly unlikable atrocity. I was sick of the copy-me memes aimed to “raise awareness” in the most irritatingly faux-clever way possible for causes that we’re all very much aware of already thank you very much. (Seriously, do we really need to raise any more awareness for breast cancer? Who honestly believes that the Internet doesn’t pay enough attention to boobs? This does not strike me as a severely neglected cause.)

I’d been using Twitter for several months, and had just gotten an invite to Google+. Then a blushing newcomer to the social networking scene, not even out of beta yet, Google+ promised to be every bit Facebook’s superior. There was no point sticking with a sub-standard social networking website when there were so many alternatives available, and fully capable of providing all my networking needs without all the glut and annoyance.

So it was time to cut it out. No more Facebook for me. I was going to quit and never look back.

“But why quit?” you ask (I imagine, for you’re not actually interacting with me as I write this). “Why not just spend less time on Facebook, until your interest in it is equal to the amount of effort you expend on it?”

Funny thing about websites: once you’ve developed an overly serious relationship with one, it can be hard to go back to casual use. It can be done, but trust me, it’s hard. You start off innocently enough - you log in for a quick glance at your feed. Responding to a few comments couldn’t hurt. Before you know it, it’s 1:00 am, you’ve been obsessively tagging disembodied extremities in forty-some photos from your second-cousin’s wedding last week, you’ve become a fan of seven more minor celebrities plus a few ironic puns, and now you’re trading lolcats with an old gradeschool “friend” who, upon reflection, was always mean to you when you were kids. Your eyes are tearing up from staring at the screen, and you feel a vague sense of shame, but can’t seem to extricate yourself from the desk chair, which has molded to the shape of your ass.

No, I had to make a clean break of it. I knew myself, and I knew that moderation has never been my forte. The only way out was all the way out.

To find out what happened next, go on to Part 2.