Facebook is an addiction. If you cannot see that, you’re already addicted.
When I first heard of Facebook’s psycho experiments, I knew I had to get off. Facebook went from a place to connect, to a global shithouse focused on fucking with your mind.
Though I was conscientious of the fact I spent way too much time on Facebook, I didn’t do much about it. Why? Because I was addicted.
I started taking to others who had deleted their Facebook accounts. One thing most of them said was after closing their account, they continually would go back to Facebook.com. Only after 3-4 days, were they able to change this routine. Cray. So, my question them was: what did you do to replace your FB time? Their answer: they went to news sites and actually learned something.
Ok, ok, that’s awesome. Get smarter, save time, get disconnected from the social experiment. But, my concern was, what about all of my connections? I can’t lose them. I’ve got friends, family, etc.
Alright, can I use a different platform? Ello, email, Skype? Email kind of sucks, only nerds use IRC (I’m a nerd, but not a lot of people I know), and not everyone has iMessage. Alright, I want to keep Facebook, but I no longer want to look at my bullshit home feed filled with crappy shit from Distractify.
I had a few options. Do I keep Facebook messenger? Do I only use Facebook on my phone? I decided for the latter. But how do I prevent myself from using it on my laptop?
Meet SelfControl. SelfControl allows you to make a blacklist of web addresses and prevents you from accessing them. I could keep FB, but I couldn’t open it. Sweet. But, what to do now? I still tried to open FB, like 5 times. I couldn’t access it, so I went to Feedly and consumed information from Qntra. I also logged onto #bitcoin-assets on IRC. Holy shit, the others were right, you do start to read.
Skip forward a bit. It’s been 3 days since I’ve installed SelfControl. I can tell you, it’s great. I’ve gotten the routine out of my system. In fact, look at me – I’m blogging. WTF? Facebook sucks, really. It’s wasted time, or put in another way: FB is empty calories making you fat and stupid. Log off and do something useful (read, program, hang with your kids, whatev). 🙂