What Sarah Said

It’s been one year since I deleted my Facebook and Instagram accounts. I didn’t temporarily deactivate them with the intention of returning after taking a break. I downloaded all of my information — photos, videos, messages — had a blast going through and organizing them all, then permanently deleted the accounts. Meta makes you wait through a 30-day “Are you sure?” period before carrying out the deletion. 

People often ask why. There are a lot of reasons. 

I used to work at Facebook in 2018 and the first half of 2019. I liken that job to working at a circus on fire. I regularly had the sneaking suspicion that certain coworkers were actually just three toddlers standing on each others’ shoulders wearing a trench coat. In my role, I worked as a Content Strategist. For all the shit I talk about the company culture, I do have to admit that the content team consisted of a lovely bunch of creative, empathetic, supportive individuals. The same goes for the designers and UX researchers. 

I worked on the Profile team and on several different sub-teams during my year and a half there. The first was the public profile team, the mission of which was to get people to make more things public — visible to anyone on Facebook — on their profile. We did extensive international and domestic user research on this and can you guess how many people wanted to do this? Zero, is the answer. Shocking, right? In addition to that underlying ickiness, I also briefly supported the Growth team, which aggressively worked to get users to adopt various features sometimes rather sneakily. It just all felt wrong. There was also a joke within Facebook that people would announce that they were deactivating their Facebook accounts in a post, then deactivate, only to sign back in the next day to see how many reactions and comments they got on that post because they just couldn’t stay away. Gross, right? Suffice to say that all the various social media offal that went into the sausage-making made for an easy and early strike one. 

The deletion was far from a knee-jerk reaction. A year prior, I decided to start making mental notes of how often I used social media and how it made me feel. 

On any given day, I’d open the Facebook app and after cringing at whatever memory it decided to show me, I’d look at the algorithm’s version of front page news, which was just posts from the 10 or 15 people I interacted with most often. Then I’d continue to scroll through so many ads and posts from people I didn’t know, that trying to find anything I actually cared about became a laughable endeavor. During all that scrolling, I noticed my shoulders hunching, my jaw clenching, and my eyes tensing. These are not the physical sensations of someone who is happy, at ease, or relaxed. Many times over the course of that year, I would open the apps out of boredom or to kill time. But after a few scrolls, I found myself asking the question, “Why am I doing this? What value is this adding to my life?” Nothing? Cool cool.

After doing that dozens of times, I naturally found myself using it less and less. The ultimate indicator that it was time to let go was when we got our professional wedding photos back and I didn’t even care to post them on social. What could have been the ultimate social validation fest, I just completely passed on. Pair that with the role Meta played during the elections, and yeah, it was time.

A week before I decided to delete my accounts, I posted my plan and asked folks to DM me their phone numbers if they wanted to stay in touch. And I had a really lovely couple of weeks of connecting with old friends over text, phone calls, and Zoom. This moment reinforced what I already knew which was that I much prefer and highly value one-on-one interactions and discussions over posting into the void and seeing what happens to come back. It’s so much more personal and intimate. 

Reflecting on this past year without Facebook or Instagram, I can safely say that not only do I not miss it, I don’t even think about it. Really, ever. Part of this is probably because I did the slow fade-out ending rather than an abrupt, splashier stop. I’m also not completely off the grid. I still have LinkedIn because I value that platform highly. I also discovered a very pleasant and inspiring online community of artists, writers, dreamers, and thinkers on Substack. I mostly lurk rather than create, but I really enjoy the content there. Once in a while, a friend will send me an Instagram reel that I can’t access. Add that to numerous TikTok videos I’ve been sent but can’t watch because I never signed up for the app, I still have zero FOMO.

What I’ve been reveling in during this past year is the combination of focus, peacefulness, and ease that I now have thanks to the utter lack of noise that social media added to my life and headspace. When a major news-worthy event happens in my life, I send a flurry of texts to friends and family, and get genuine responses. It’s quite freeing to not be in on the collective conversation of the internet. I’m just over here having actual conversations the old-fashioned way. And that suits me just fine.