The Campbell Academy Blog (215)

After cold turkey

Somewhere around two or three years ago, I “gave up” Facebook.

By “gave up” I mean, I took it off my phone and logged out on my laptop and stopped checking newsfeeds and messages and pretty much anything to do with it.

I understand that the rest of the world entirely communicates via this medium, so we kept a presence in place for the academy on Facebook, to communicate with people that like to communicate that way and also a very small closed Facebook group for some of our referring dentists.

The reason I gave up, is because I found myself spending considerable periods of my time looking at stuff on Facebook, which was of absolutely no use to me! The was an evening where I was sat downstairs in my kitchen at nearly 10 o’clock at night looking at Facebook pages of the dental gym group, while my wife was upstairs, and I wasn’t talking to her!

It’s a funny thing now though, because I’m over all that.

It wouldn’t cross my mind to put Facebook on my phone now, in fact under no circumstances would I do that, I don’t have twitter, I don’t have Instagram, I don’t have snapchat, I have no need to put these things on my devices and it has not cost me, either financially, emotionally or in any other way, to not be on them.

Not that I can see in any event.

I’ve used the time a lot more wisely, at least for me.

I’ve read more, listened to more and looked more.

In some small circles now I’m known as “that guy”, the weirdo that gave up social media.

There is a subculture of us now though (as there is a sub culture of everything) and when I find some of the other people that have done this, and hear about them or read about them, it gives me a wonderful satisfaction, because it’s generally people that I would look to and admire.

There is of course a generation of people who never got started on it and they seem to be doing fine too, and there is now a new generation of people coming in from underneath and they will be much less dependant on social media as a means of communication and verifying their status.

A word of caution though.

The social media giants are very keen to have you engaged with your phone as much as possible and they do this by buying up and promoting any sort of activity which increased your phone time.

Any aspect of phone time = engaged where in social media (because it’s hard to stay off, once you’re on).

And so, at the moment on my phone, although I have WhatsApp for communication for my football team and a few other people, there is one group open (only because I owe it some money).

You can convince yourself that you are not on Facebook, but Facebook own WhatsApp and once you get over 50-100 WhatsApp groups, you’re in big trouble.

Ask yourself this question about WhatsApp.

“Why do they not give you an option to leave a group without it being visible?”

The reason for that, is that they don’t want you to leave… ever, and that can’t be a good thing, you should try it, come off for a fortnight or three weeks, don’t answer anything and don’t look at anything.

Stop, it will be better, and it will feel better and life will seem different.