I started using for the first time in August 2016 right after I got married. But having seen that it had a negative impact on our married life, I stopped using it after six months. When I had to start using it again in July 2018, my original intention was only to start a business page for my new business of Jewish life coaching. But right after I reopened my Facebook account I was innundated with friend requests. So I told myself why not and wad dragged into using it rather unconsciously for the purpose I hadn't originally intended - personal communication with "friends".
Earlier this week I made a conscious decision to rectify what I came to consider as a costly mistake. The mistake was costly as it cost me my mental wellbeing. Facebook as a means of personal communication became the main source of my daily stress because of a huge gap I felt between the kind of online communication I had desired and what I experienced in reality.
It didn't take me a long time that most people I made "friends" with on Facebook, including those I also know offline, have a totally different, seemingly unconscious, agenda in their use of Facebook for personal communication with their respective "friends" - mutual instant gratification of their ego, which was and still is the last thing I wanted and the first thing I wanted to evade.
Nevertheless it took me almost three years to make this conscious decision to stop using Facebook for personal communication. During this period I had an illusory hope that I might be able to have the kind of meaningful personal communication with enough of my "friends". I had only one such person with whom I could have such communication on a regular basis - one of my ex-teachers in Chabad Chassidus.
Before making this decision I minimized the number of people I remained in touch with personally on Facebook. The maximal number of "friends" I had on Facebook was about 150, which happens to be the so-called Dumber's number. By the time I made the above mentioned decison I had reduced the number of "friends" to about 50. In spite of that the posts of most of them didn't interest me as they seemed to have stemmed from their ego for instant gratifications. I'm sure that this feeling was mutual. Most of them must have found my posts boring.
Unfortunately, I couldn't stop using Facebook completely as I have to continue using it for my business page there to market my rather new private business of Jewish life coaching. But I could finally gett rid of that part of my use of Facebook that had a negative impact on my mental wellbeing. In this process I deleted all my posts and unfriended everyone equally.
Though it's only a few days since I stopped using Facebook for personal communication, I already feel enormous improvement in the way I feel and function in my daily life - far better!
Of course, I'm not denying the use of Facebook for personal communication categorically. It may be useful for certain people. It simply wasn't and isn't for me. If you are like me and thiking of stopping your personal, if not professional, use of Facebook, you may also benefit from two YouTube clips I listened to again and one book I read again before making this decision: What Do You Think about Facebook by Eckhart Tolle and Quit Social Media by Cal Newport; Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier.
This decision is also in tune with my annual ritual of finding a personal "exodus from Egypt" during the Passover (we'll start the seventh of the Passover this evening). My "Egypt" this time was Facebook. Peace.