Deactivating my Facebook account

Few days ago I installed an awesome Chrome plugin that allowed me to hide every post from my Facebook timeline. I figured I’ve been spending too much time scrolling down my timeline and having unimportant conversations that really destroyed my already broken mood.

Today I decided to deactivate my Facebook profile hoping that I will be able to focus more on my “real” life rather than my stupid virtual one, where I was too busy arguing with people that wouldn’t change their mind about anything.

When you deactivate your Facebook account you basically put your account on hold. You are not deleting your content (photos, videos, chatlogs), you are only making it unreachable to everyone (including yourself) until you decide to reactivate your account. I am not sure if you could still use Messenger, but I’ve read that you can technically use it even without a Facebook account, but I’m not really interested in this.

One thing to keep in mind is that reactivating the account is – in my opinion – way too easy. You literally just need to log back in, and the account will be automatically reactivated. It’s quite annoying, so I guess you’ll need a strong will if you want to commit to not getting trapped in it again.

To proceed with the deactivation I followed few simple steps:

1. Communicated my intention to relevant friends/contacts (giving them info on how to keep in touch)
2. Backed up my Facebook content
3. Deactivated my account
4. Uninstalled Facebook + Messenger app
5. Removed Facebook from my LastPass archive (to avoid easy login)

So, why would you want to deactivate your Facebook account? There are, in my opinion, several pros and cons

It happened few times already that I thought “I should just delete my account“, but I never really did it because – as a game developer and entrepreneur – it is kinda stupid to get rid of an entire network of contacts. It is, in general, not the smartest move, and even right now I’m not sure if I’m doing the right thing (since I’m close to releasing Memoir En Code: Reissue on Steam).

At the same time, I know that staying on Facebook is, right now, a huge disservice to my mental health and the deactivation allows me to take a (hopefully long) break from this crazy social network without forcing me to trash everything out of the window.

As a result, I think I will probably be more active than before on Twitter and – I hope – on this blog that I will try to keep updated more often than I did in the past two months (shame on me!).

It is stupid but it feels almost like…I dunno…quitting smoking, or something like that. Remember that you can always do it too (and you can easily change your mind and log back in), but don’t forget that you’re in control of your life always (or, well, most of the time).