On December 31st, 2018, I finally made the decision to delete my Facebook account, and all related pages. I’m not talking about deactivating it so I could log back in again, I mean completely and totally trashing it. I say finally because it took me a long time to come to this conclusion. I had debated the decision for, honestly, years, before I finally decided I had enough.

A self proclaimed social media enthusiast might not be the first person you would think of to delete Facebook, but I have deleted a surprising number of social media platforms from my life. I started by deleting Foursquare after I realized it was just an easy way for creepers to constantly track your location, I deleted Snapchat after they released the maps feature that constantly showed where I was, and now I’ve deleted Facebook because it simply doesn’t make me happy.

I love social media, whether I’m connecting with people on my own pages, sharing my knowledge with others, or creating and updating social media pages for businesses. This is probably one of the main reasons it took me so long to delete Facebook. I thought that if I deleted my Facebook account, I wouldn’t be able to access pages for companies I work for, and stay up to date on the latest Facebook changes. But I finally came to the conclusion that this reason alone wasn’t good enough to keep me on a platform that I hate.

For many people, Facebook is a tool that connects those of us that can’t be in each other’s lives daily. You can keep up with friends and family in the easiest way possible. And I completely understand why some people truly love Facebook, but it just wasn’t making me happy. It sounds harsh to say I dreaded Facebook, but it’s true. I never posted on my page or anyone else’s, I very rarely looked at what anyone else was sharing, and the few times that I logged on were to look at the groups I was involved in, or find more information on an event or business. Knowing this, I started my “Facebook deletion process” slowly, over the course of a few years, by first deleting the app off my phone, then logging myself out on all browsers and changing the password so I’d have to look it up to log in. Finally I made the ultimate decision to permanently delete my account.

Facebook gives you 30 days to reactive your profile even after deciding to delete it, and I’m sure they sent me a multitude of emails during that time along the lines of “please come back, you need us!!!”. (Thankfully I’ll never see these emails, since I stopped using the email address associated with my account around 2009.) After these 30 days were finally up, it felt like a weight had been lifted, and in the meantime, I haven’t once regretted my decision.

This isn’t to say that I’ll be off the platform forever. There were a few groups I truly enjoyed being a part of, and I’ll need a way to log in to business Facebook pages. This means I’ll likely create a shell profile, where I don’t add friends or interact with anything other than using it to access pages and groups. But who knows what the future holds.

If you’re in the same situation that I was and are considering deleting Facebook, but aren’t sure of the downsides, just delete it. There’s always another way to keep in touch with those long lost relatives or friends, whether it’s texting, calling, or reaching out on another platform. And chances are, you won’t even miss it once it’s gone.

And if you’re looking for a new way to get ahold of me, you’ll always (maybe) be able to find me on Twitter!