Facebook Fast at Mid-Month

Near the beginning of the month, I embarked on a Facebook Fast. I call it that because, similar to how you don't actually stop eating for a fast (just drink gross stuff like broth or wheatgrass), I haven't given up Facebook for the month. I can't. I get paid to do just the opposite.

But I don't get paid to use it at home, so I decided to find out how banishing it from my house would affect my life.

I don't spend hours on Facebook, but I do end up there whenever I get distracted or am not sure what to do next. For a person with ADD, this happens a lot. Without Facebook, two things have happened: first, when I don't know what to do next I'm forced to spend a few seconds considering how I want to spend my time. This has made me more intentional about what I do.

Secondly, when I want to share something, I can't just throw it up on my Facebook wall. I have to decide whether I want to share it on twitter, the blog, or in a personal email to a friend. I have replied to some long-overdue emails and, even more surprisingly, returned two phone calls (anyone who knows me knows I don't do telephone conversations). After all that, I wrote a letter.

Our society seems to be gravitating toward a default practice of universal sharing. I'll be the first to admit my Facebook page is important. I put a lot of effort into making sure it represents me in just the way I want. But at the end of the day, those personal emails to friends, those phone calls, those handwritten letters—those are the real substance of human connection. Facebook is like pop music: fun to indulge in and maybe even necessary, but not something to put at the foundation of our existence.

Sometimes, though, we need to remove extraneous factors to figure out what should be at the foundation of our existence.