Let’s all be honest here. We’re addicted to social media, more specifically, we’re obsessed with Facebook. As soon as we wake up, we reach for our phones and check everything on it. Who can blame us? That’s where we get the latest updates on what we missed while we were asleep. We find out what’s happening around us and we get the latest dish on our friends and neighbors.
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However, we all have those moments when it seems like scrolling through Facebook had negative effects on us. I remember coming home from work feeling really terrible about my performance as a supervisor in a smelting plant. I just had an argument with my boss and I was feeling exhausted with the way things were handled at work. I felt overworked for something that doesn’t even pay me right. So when I got home that night, I started feeling really bad after scrolling through my feed. All my friends seemed to enjoy what they’re doing. They’re either on vacation or working abroad and having really good pictures of them taken.
I just felt envious of what I just saw that night. Then envy turned into self-pity. I just started asking myself why did I choose to become an engineer where I don’t even get paid well? Why did I stay in this job where my boss keeps on scrutinizing my performance? Why am I not on vacation right now? Why am I not happy?
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After weeks of feeling disappointed of where my life was going, I decided to deactivate my Facebook account and work on my issues. I didn’t know how long I’ll survive without it but I decided to try not using it for a week. At first it was difficult. All my family and friends talked to me on Facebook’s messenger so not having to chat with on my phone was a huge adjustment. Sometimes, I occasionally check my phone for a message on my messenger and I realized I deactivated my account.
For someone who spends hours on her phone, I had the itch to just give up and log in back to Facebook. I guess I was already very addicted to it and I didn’t know how I’d survive. I told the people I worked with about my plans to deactivate so the only way they could reach me was through text and email. I didn’t really want to know what my “friends” were doing so I just didn’t tell them about my experiment. My parents had to reach me through text as well.
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In the middle of the week, I was starting to feel the itch again. “What’s happening around the world? I wonder what my favorite celebrities are doing right now? What ever happened to that guy I dated in college? Are my workmates having dinner without me now?? I knew that if I logged on in that moment, all of these questions will be answered but I decided to clean my house when I got home from work. I was able to cook myself a nice dinner, something I haven’t done for quite some time already and I got to watch an old film I adored to de-stress myself.
On my fifth day, I decided to read a good book when I got home. The feeling of wanting to keep up on everything was slowly leaving me. I never really had an urge to post anything silly about how my day went. I don’t feel the need to impress anyone anymore. I don’t feel any form of self-pity. In fact, I was just happy reading a good book that night knowing that tomorrow will be another day at work.
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Things were starting to look well for me. I learned on my last day that I could actually survive not having Facebook in my life. Those who mattered can still reach me through text and I just felt happy with how things were during the past seven days. I felt great to be honest.
After the experience, I started to log in again on Facebook. I realized that everything was just the same. People were still posting selfies and pictures of how their day went. Cat videos still get more likes than the news and nobody really seemed to notice I was gone for seven days. That’s when I knew how sometimes using Facebook isn’t really the best thing to do for everyone. Maybe it’s healthy to detach ourselves from social media and just take a break from everyone for a while.
