A Life Without Facebook

I deactivated my facebook account today. I have been spending too much time on the site and with all of the things I really need to do, like going through all of my junk and moving out of my apartment in preparation for getting into my house, and all of the things I want to do, like read more and work on some of my software projects, I just wasn’t getting any of it done. The reason for that was because instead of doing those things I would sit for literally hours in front of my computer or on my iPhone on facebook, checking out what everyone else was doing. I can’t afford that kind of productivity lapse any longer, so I bit the bullet and turned my account off.

For what its worth, I do intend to go back there one day. I’m hoping that when I do that I’ll be able to balance the onslaught of social networking more evenly with what I need to do in the real world. And maybe in a perfect world I wouldn’t feel the need to go back to facebook at all… and I am ever hopeful for that.

I won’t lie, it’s been tough already. Going to check in to facebook and see what’s going on with the world has become second nature. Every time I open an instance of my web browser I immediately went to facebook, only to sit there at the login screen and remember that I turned it off. When I took the iPhone app off of my phone, I went for the empty space on the screen where the icon was within 5 minutes of deleting it. It was at that point that I determined that this is going to be extremely difficult to keep on doing, but also probably one of the best things I could do for myself.

Facebook itself is nothing special. The social aspect of it is what brings people and myself back to it. That kind of thing, the acceptance and approval of peers can be as addictive a thing as any drug, and facebook interaction is an addiction for me. Up until today I felt like I couldn’t live without facebook, but after today I’m going to try my hardest to do exactly that.