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I had contemplated deleting my Facebook account for over two years before I finally did, and it’s one of my best decisions. Here’s why I permanently removed my account after deactivating it for a while, and why I suggest doing the same for others.
1Facebook Continued Getting More Toxic
Maybe Facebook was always like this and I was blissfully ignorant. But over the years, I noticed that the website got more and more toxic. I noticed my Facebook news feed getting worse after the 2016 US elections, and things reached a tipping point for me during the COVID-19 lockdowns.
It felt like people were getting more and more adversarial with people who disagreed with them, regardless of where they were on the political spectrum. I am also not immune to this because I was just as bad on Twitter and other platforms. However, I wanted to stop viewing others as enemies and have more mature conversations about sensitive topics—even if we don’t agree.
Seeing so much negativity and animosity wears you down, and I found myself in a constant state of fight or flight. Even if I was taking a backseat on Facebook, I felt like I had better things to do with my life than watching others type angry words at each other through a screen. Deleting Facebook subsequently helped mestop doomscrolling on social media.
2I Wanted to Remove a Lot of People From My Life
While I occasionallycleaned up my Facebook accountby trimming my friends list, you’ll often find friction between removing people you used to be close with. Having been on the platform since 2009, I had accumulated several “friends” that I no longer had anything in common with. And to be honest, I also had a lot of people on my friends list that I never really knew in the first place; we just happened to go to the same school or university.
I know that you can unfollow people you don’t want to unfriend and hide their posts, but it wasn’t about not seeing individuals from the past on my feed. I did not want them to know what I was doing; not because I disliked them, but because it’s none of their business.
Dunbar’s numbersuggests that we can only have around 150 relationships simultaneously—and while my 500 friends didn’t look like a lot on paper, it’s well above this. Rather than awkwardly deciding to keep someone on my friend’s list because I once met them at a party, I found it easier to delete my account altogether.
I did, however, make one mistake. There were some people that I genuinely cared about and would have liked to stay in contact with. In hindsight, I’dtake more time before deleting my social accountsto assess who I wanted to stay in touch with (and then reach out to them).
3I Wanted to Minimize How Many Social Media Apps I Used
In 2019, I was on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. I was a very heavy user of each—I remember one day when I clocked up nine hours of screen time.
Being on social media seemed like the normal thing to do. If we also count MSN, I had been active across all platforms since 2007. It was hard for me to remember a time without social media, and for this reason, I never questioned whether it was negatively impacting how I interacted with the world.
While enduring a difficult time in late 2019, I decided I needed to change. During this era of intense self-improvement, I learned about reward pathways and how social media can impact this. Maintaining an open mind, I deactivated all my accounts (apart from LinkedIn) for almost a year.
After my experiment, I posted twice on Facebook; one announced my return, and the other was to say that I had moved from the UK to Denmark. Ironically, the second post made me realize that I didn’t want to be on Facebook for this new chapter (and that I was happier without it). So, Ipermanently deleted my Facebook accounta few weeks later.
4I Found Better (and Alternative) Ways to Contact People
People often worry that they won’t have a way to contact people without Facebook or whichever social media account they want to delete. This is a genuine concern, but thankfully, you’ve got plenty of options these days.
I was constantly worried about deleting my Facebook account because if I did, people couldn’t contact me. But if I really wanted to use Messenger, I could have just created a private and unsearchable account—and then used the Messenger app.
Lots of people are on WhatsApp (plus alternatives like Telegram), and I decided that these were much better alternatives to Facebook. Good old-fashioned text messaging and iMessage are two other options, and you can even keep in touch via Instagram.
5I No Longer Liked How Facebook Made Me Feel
When I first joined Facebook, I saw it as a cool way to keep in touch with my friends and family. In the early days, I had largely positive views and feelings when I went on the app. But over time, things changed for the worse. Besides getting bored of the app, two other big problems arose.
Firstly, Facebook sapped my creativity. Because I was spending so much time on Facebook, I wasn’t doing anywhere near as much as I could have been with my big creative dreams and ideas. And even when I did, it was in service of social media (for example, I took photos that would get likes from my Facebook friends instead of what I actually wanted to capture).
Facebook also made me feel intense FOMO, especially when I saw how everyone else was doing. For example, I quit my job and started my first business at a time when my friends were getting job promotions. While I knew that leaving my job was the right long-term decision, I was also broke at the time. Combine that with others getting pay rises, etc., and you can see the problem here.
I also felt obliged to post whenever I did anything interesting. For example, if I was traveling, I had to tell my friends where I was going. Since deleting Facebook, I’m much happier not feeling like I need to share all of my life. This is one of thebiggest mistakes you could make on Facebook.
Deleting my Facebook account was a huge decision, but I can say with certainty that it was one of my best long-term decisions. I have better relationships with the people who matter, and I’m no longer exposed to anywhere near as much negativity as I was. Not oversharing my personal life is also a huge advantage. I suggest deactivating your account for three months and seeing how you feel thereafter; if you enjoy your life offline, don’t hesitate to permanently delete it.
