Thanks to Newsweek’s pseudo-revolutionary article a few weeks back, “31 Ways To Get Smarter in 2012“, and a book called The Shallows about the Internet’s effects on our brains, I have been inspired to unplug myself and live life largely Facebook/social media-free. It’s been three weeks now. While drafting my new year resolutions for 2012 – an annual ritual I do on a customized, bullet-listed Word document, I decided to make quite a few life changes this year for the sake of self-improvement. Among the changes I wanted to make – some superficial and others more weightier, the Facebook resolution seemed to make the most long-lasting changes in my lifestyle. “Why?” you ask, perplexed. Well, Facebook appears to have taken a greater hold of my life than I thought and proved to be a deep-set fabric of our lives, whether we like to admit or not.

I speak from this “Facebook Kick” platform not as a disgruntled user, nor as a socialite that needs a break from online socializing. I’m a marginal user. I use it to maintain an online presence. I use it to accept friend requests, follow up with new friends I’ve made along the way, keep in touch with existing ones, and upload content, sporadic mobile photos, somewhat impersonal status updates that are pertinent to me on a momentary basis and by no means reflect who I am. However, my best friends are not avid users. The biggest concern I came across as a user wasn’t maintaining my personal page of content. It was news feed.

In moments of boredom, I would catch myself updating myself with news feeds on a disturbingly regular basis. Breaks at work, sitting at traffic lights, scrolling on my Blackberry during lulls at happy hours and during commercial breaks in my privacy. Before you knew it, I had wasted hours of my day, unknowingly being in the “know” about people’s personal lives, vacations, relationships, promotions, foods consumed, check-ins, grammatical ineptness, and 20 engagements. Being overly updated and plugged in didn’t exactly instill positivity or happiness – instead, more like nosiness, criticism, judgment, rolling of eyes, comparison of my life with theirs, and even disdain. Facebook didn’t seem to enrich my life (in the way that I used it) – it simply filled my mind up with mindless fodder and wasted thoughts that could be better used.

So without hesitation, I decided once and for all to cut down on the Facebook habit, simply because I was outgrowing it; it wasn’t efficient for me to be spending time on it anymore. I realized 90% of my Facebook “friends” were no longer relevant. Their updates were no longer relevant. My life existed outside of Facebook, and my psyche should reflect that. I stopped logging on more than once or twice throughout the day. I cut my incessant need to “catch myself up” with news feeds. I stopped scrolling past the first fold. And before you knew it, I haven’t felt freer and more cut off from a virtual reality that wasn’t meaningful to me anymore.

In the past, the thought of deactivating seemed too extreme. The thought of cutting myself off completely seemed so isolating, like a divorce or social amputation. But what I had feared, when put into practice, actually became a positive experience. Why I challenge you to be Facebook-free for a few months:

1. It creates (frees up) lots of mental space – like work, personal time, devotional time, personal relationships immediate to you. You don’t find yourself thinking about people, news, or events that are irrelevant. That’s it. That is “freedom”, not “isolation”. Back in caveman times, people survived just fine without having to know what the caveman clans next door were doing in their huts or how they were were retrieving food.
2. It enriches work performance: It increases your productivity by cutting out interruptions and distractions. Your train of thought becomes, like Carr contrasts with cluttered “Internet” mind, linear, consolidated, uninterrupted, better concentrated, sharper, richer, less frenetic and scatter-brained. It puts the focus back on your life, your priorities, and the people who matter the most to you.
3. It even increases creativity and forces you to seek other methods of entertainment, fun, and ambitions you once neglected. After logging off, even during holidays, I’d catch myself revisiting art, drawing, reading, magazines, articles. Just as how your body adapts to a suddenly missing limb or one of your five senses, your body doesn’t suffer – it learns to adapt and grow stronger without the missing ligament by intensifying the senses you have left. When Facebook gets cut out of your life, your mind adapts after some time to seek other outlets of media, information, and so forth.
4. You’re happier. Before, you were constantly caught up with your peers and how they were doing, and you probably were doing everything else besides being happy and free. But now, you can’t remember the last time you criticized someone for their 20 self-portrait shots in the bathroom or their hangover status updates – or worrying about what people think.