Day 4

I deactivated my Facebook account on Sunday morning, a little before 9:00am.  Before doing so, I was able to download a zip file of all of the information that was on my profile, including all of my pictures, and save it to my desktop.  This way, I didn't lose any of that information, and I'll be able to access it while offline.

With Sunday being erev Rosh Hashanah, Andy and I woke up early and drove back to Teaneck to complete all sorts of last minute tasks before the holiday.  The truth is, I didn't even notice that I had deactivated my Facebook because I didn't have any time to check it.  Since Monday and Tuesday were Rosh Hashanah, and I don't check Facebook on Shabbat or chaggim, today is the first "real" Facebook-less day.

Already, I'm noticing a difference.  After chag, my first instinct was to log onto Facebook in order to see what I had missed.  Luckily, I had enough unread emails and was so exhausted that I was able to distract myself from really missing Facebook.  In that moment though, it felt a little bit like an addiction-- a mindless urge to reach for my phone and check an app, without even being aware of what I was doing.  This is the behavior I'm hoping to change.

Last night, a friend texted me a link to a video she saw on Facebook, and in order to click on it, I had to be logged in.  Somehow, the phone logged me into my "professional" Facebook page, which I only kept activated so that I could manage the Facebook page for my organization (as the resident "young person" on staff, I'm in charge of the social media).  But it makes me worried that I might get emailed links which will require me to log into my personal Facebook account in order to read the article and see the video.  I wanted a reprieve from social media, but not to become a social pariah.

This morning, I ran into a friend from high school while walking to work.  We haven't really kept in touch, but she has recently moved to New York and we both agreed we'd like to get together to catch up.  She said she'd reach out over Facebook-- I gave her my email address instead and told her I would send her my phone number.  We were both rushing to get to our respective obligations, so I simply told her that the no-Facebook thing was a New Year's resolution.  She wasn't too worried, and we agreed to get in touch after the chaggim.

It also occurred to me that when I see people on the street who I think are people that I know, I now no longer have an outlet for confirming whether or not that person is, indeed, in New York.

One last thing to note-- I follow a page on Facebook called Humans of New York, wherein an extremely talented photographer takes pictures of people throughout New York and gives them a platform to tell their stories.  He finds people from all different walks of life and profiles them in a way that makes us feel connected to them and bettered for having shared a moment with them.  The HONY Facebook page is often proclaimed as the page with the nicest comments on Facebook, and it's true-- the comments are extremely supportive and empathetic.  I'm finding that the comments on the HONY Instagram feed are actually much less kind and not nearly as supportive.  I was a little disappointed to realize this.  And then I remembered the number one rule of the Internet-- never read the comments!