Yesterday I quit.

(oh by the way, sorry for the two-month absence, but I’ve been preoccupied with writer’s block)

So yeah, I deactivated my Facebook account yesterday. As you can see, I’ve been on there for nearly six years. Six years?! Holy whoa. Let’s see, that’s two marriages, a handful of failed relationships, busted friendships, and other life things that I can easily find on my Facebook timeline (that honestly shouldn’t have been there in the first place).

You might find yourself wondering why. Haha, well, I guess I am finding myself asking the same question. Truthfully, there’s no real right or wrong answer to that question. My main motivation, however, is that I was tired of it. Tired of the drama. Tired of seeing the same kind of posts over and over again. Tired of Zuckerberg and his penchant for changing things every chance he gets.

My very first public wall post.

Over time, I began to notice certain things. Like if I was particularly annoying one day (ie, posting various memes), I would stop hearing from certain people that used to comment often on my posts. It made me very paranoid, that I didn’t know if people were unsubscribing from my updates, and that was beginning to bother me. There’s no reason to let it bother me, yet I was letting it get to me. This became apparent when I went to post about leaving, and all of about four people commented on it. I then made the mistake of sending out a mass message, which people left without replying. So then I was left thinking, well, if you really wanted to keep in contact with me, you would have replied to the message, or sent me a reply separately.

Oh well. There is one thing I can definitely say, and that is that I never ONCE gave into Farmville, or any other iteration of the “ville” games. I only ever got sucked into Sims Social and Words with Friends. And I don’t play them anymore.

The point is, I’m done. The majority of people that I interacted with on Facebook, are able to converse with me outside of Facebook. Sure, it was a primary mode of communication for me and a lot of my friends. Yeah, I may lose out of knowing the up to date goings on of some of them. But you know what? A lot of those people only spoke to me when it was time to write on my wall for my birthday. That’s all fine and good, but what’s the point?

Of course, it took me a while to actually *leave*. Mr. Fox informed me that I was able to download an archive of all my Facebook data, which included all of my photos and wall posts (though I’ve found that it only went as far back as my birthday, which annoyed me). But, the upside to that is being able to have all of my photo files organized by the albums. That made me happy.

It’s really easy to download an archive of your data. First, you want to be signed in, obviously. Go to your Account Settings.

Click on the link that says Download a copy of your Facebook data. From there, it will ask you for your password and then send you an email when your archive is ready to be downloaded.

Once you receive the email to download, you’ll be asked for your password again, and you will also be given the option to download an expanded archive in addition to the basic archive. The basic archive includes an HTML doc of your messages, wall posts, photos, videos, as well as all of your photo and video files. The expanded archive contains all of your personal information. I went ahead and downloaded both the basic and the expanded.

So, Facebook, I wasted almost 6 years of my life on you. And I couldn’t be happier to be rid of you. It feels like a weight has been lifted off my shoulders. I may have only deactivated you, but I am going to wait about 3 months before I delete you entirely.

If you want other means to contact me, you can first and foremost send me an email. I always reply to those. I am also on Google+, which is really nice because not many people are on it yet (also a drawback, so if you’re not on there, you should be!). Finally, I am on twitter, as @estherfoxDOTcom, so if you’re not already following me, you should. Here’s some links to some other profiles/sites I am on:

about.me
Instagram
Pinterest (begrudgingly, even though I haven’t been on there in months, I still have the account)
Foursquare

leaving facebook goodbye social media zuckerberg sucks

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