What's the future Wednesday, just give me cherries and tell me I'm pretty, and stuffs

 I deleted Facebook. Again.

May 2018 I decided to quit Facebook. I sat in my OB/GYNs office discussing anxiety and worry and all the other issues that a mid-30s gal might face at that time. At some point I said '...and then I see all the news, real and fake on Facebook and I just get bogged down'. I had said many things before that, but to that she said 'You know you can quit Facebook if you want.' Of course I knew that. Didn't I? I had thought about it. I had considered it, maybe. Did I know I could actually do it?......

So I did. Well, I deactivated it. Same thing, no one could find me. I did have a business profile though, I kept that to manage a small public service that I provided and the page was used for scheduling and announcements. No friends. I didn't follow anyone. 

For 8 years that business profile has stood alone. I no longer use it, I no longer provide my service, but I still had the page. I joined a local PSA group for road closures and ribbon cuttings. I joined an insiders group for a small but growing brand I liked. I joined a fitness accountability group and made a few buddies. But I was still mainly anonymous, and still alone with no FB stress. 

Then a friend request came in. Someone I knew personally but had lost touch with years ago. I accepted, but had no interaction. I found myself visiting FB a few times each week to catch up on my groups, and now this friend's page. 

Then another request came in. Someone else I hadn't seen in years. ...I let it sit. 

Within the next 2 weeks I received 6 more friend requests from people I actually knew and missed a bit. I didn't accept any of them. 

I decided to review my usage time. Not including time I logged in on my computer, my phone showed I was accessing FB for more than 25hrs each week. That's around 4 hours per day, plus some. I didn't even have friends on there. What was I doing? I was stress-refreshing groups for posts. I checked brand pages for releases so I didn't miss a new drop. I scrolled and scrolled and scrolled. I'd log in just to scroll. For nothing. The system began to feed me suggested pages and AI posts because I had no connections. And then, somehow, it started to try to connect us so it didn't lose me. 

It's February 2026 and I've deactivated that profile. I deleted Facebook from my phone. I can't login online. 

There isn't any grand lesson here, just a now 40-something woman documenting her second breakup with some social media that she didn't realize she was addicted to. It tried to pull me in with lost friends, but instead I'm trying to get lost.

No novel ideas. I'm not a pioneer at anything. But when I sit at my computer and open a new web tab and have no idea what I'm going to look at I've realized it was always that, an unknown addiction.

Now I'm on my old blog, a place I used to document my mundane thoughts. Full transparency, I had an addiction to this at one time too. We'll see.  

-L