A Week Without Facebook Brought Me Back to Actual Reality

Going off Facebook isn’t easy. Like a lot of people these days, I suffer from an addiction to social media. And for many of us, Facebook is a very big part of that.

Indeed, after announcing to my friends and followers on Friday morning I was “going off Facebook” for a week, I cheated on the very first day.

I checked in to see if anyone had responded favorably (or negatively) to my hiatus announcement, or had replied to any of my last comments on the previous days’ threads.

Feeling guilty for cheating, I logged off Facebook after a couple of moments, and then realized that I had to turn off “notifications” too, so I didn’t have them tempting me to cheat again, with those beckoning banners.

Vowing to myself not to look again, how did I spend the rest of my time that day? Or rather, how did I allow my day to be further time-sucked away from me? Well, I soon found myself on Twitter: Facebook’s equally evil addictive twin. And then I wasted time on Instagram, Linked In, and…the monster that is YouTube.

Talk about going down the rabbit hole! YouTube does though takes you off on viewing tangents that you never intended. On this particular day, I started watching an old video of Alpine and ended up an hour or so later watching a trio of girl folk singers in the Democratic Republic of Georgia!

Realizing that I’d merely swapped my Facebook addiction for other social media, I then decided that I had to go cold turkey by banishing all social media for the rest of the week.

Where is the twelve step program for that?

Ironically, I’d cut television out of my life seven years ago for pretty much the same reason, and now, here I am trying to ween myself off Facebook as well. I used to spend hours and hours staring at the “boob tube” (as my parents used to call it) as though I was brain dead.

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