I didn't totally eliminate Facebook from my life but I took the first step. I realized one day something that I think all of us have become aware of at some point in their lives: That nothing good comes from being on there. I would find myself staring at my phone for long periods of time and at the end of it all I ever saw was the same garbage over and over again. I have a few friends that see it as their duty to post something political on a daily basis and these same people are constantly lecturing others on how they should live their lives.
Is it a coincidence that these same people are also not someone you would consider successful? Seriously, there isn't a single person on either side of the stupid Trump vs notTrump argument on Facebook that has really made anything of themselves. Most of them still live in the same towns that they have always lived in (not that there is anything wrong with that) and they all aimed really low with their life expectations... and they achieved that!
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I'm not gonna preach about how I totally left Facebook because I didn't. My account is still out there I just haven't looked at it in over a month now. I can't leave totally because so many of the people I know this is the only method I have of communicating with them. I have tried to get them involved with Telegram or LINE but they can't figure it out or simply refuse to learn anything new. I don't feel like either one of those chat apps are "difficult" but some people just can't do anything unless it is made super easy the way that FB is.
So I was happy to hear that you actually can keep your FB messenger without it showing you anything about the main page. This is all I actually did and it was super awesome how almost immediately my life became far more productive. I was sleeping better because I didn't get caught up in the comments section somewhere, and any time there was a lull in my day, rather than just scroll away I got up and went and did something else.
Like most people I have a routine of sorts and within just a few days of ditching FB on my phone I found that I was finishing all of them hours earlier and was moving on to something I enjoy doing much earlier in my day.
Now whenever there is a moment in my day that I would normally spend scrolling endlessly through what is bound to the be the same ol' shit from people on FB, I instead reach for my trusty 9gag app. This is a fantastic way to waste time as well but at least it has the decency to be funny.
Sure there is nothing productive about any of this either but the comments section aren't filled with political bullcrap the way that FB is.
You aren't going to get any good information from Facebook anyway, and if your "Friends" list is anything like mine it probably has around 1000 people in it and you don't even remember who 3/4 of them are.
It was a small step and one that I just made out of the blue one day while I was on the sofa watching a Netflix show and realized all of a sudden that I didn't have any idea what the show was about even though I had been sitting in front of it for the past hour. I was staring at my phone the whole time.
I'm unlikely to totally delete my FB because I need it in order to talk to a vast majority of the people I know around the world. But in the meantime, simply holding down my finger on this one icon and hitting "uninstall" has already, just a month later, made my life a lot better.
I always knew that Facebook was a massive time waster, but it wasn't until I removed it from my own life that I truly realized how much of a waste it really was. Now I can focus on the more important things in life, such as finding funny memes and getting my work finished about 2 hours earlier than normal. I can always put it back later if I decide I want to get wrapped up in all that again.