I’ve been feeling dissatisfied with Facebook for the last several months. Partially, I don’t think it enriches my life, and that I could do with more boredom rather than filling every space with scrolling. That I’ve become more thoughtful about Facebook’s impact on me emotionally and intellectually is probably a consequence of reading this book.

It’s challenged me to be more intentional with how I engage with technology. I am curious to see what my life with less Facebook and more blogging might feel like. I’ve fallen out of the habit of writing, and I have a vague sense that I miss it even while I feel no buring desire to write about anything in particular.

This alone would be sufficient to compel me to minimize my use, but Mark Zuckerberg keeps giving me more reasons. In his recent testimony to Congress he rewrote history saying that the primary purpose of Facebook was to protest the Iraq War. This is a bald face lie. He was having a sad as his ex girlfriend and created Harvard hot or not. There wasn’t any functionality to editorialize, so this lie is so egregious he might have said Facebook was created to cure cancer and been wrong in the same order of magnitude.

Years ago, I became convinced that Facebook as a news aggregator did a piss-poor job. I cultivated a Feedly account in the meantime, and am now perfectly happy with what it shows me. And for unknown reasons, my Feedly feed doesn’t make me angry or anxious to the degree that news on Facebook does. My assumption is that when I am not seeing my friends’ editorial take on links to articles, I approach the same content with a more neutral emotional affect. So, I get less self-righteous anger with those whom I agree and less conflict with those whom I don’t agree.

Armed with my Feedly account, I am ready to remain informed without Facebook. Today I am testing out whether my blog auto-posts to Facebook. Once I get that working, I am going Facebook dark for the month of December. If you want to reach me, comment here on wordpress, text, or email. Let’s see how I feel after a month of blogging and no social media.

(Note: I have Twitter, but I don’t ever log in. I don’t have Instagram. Hence, Facebook is the only social media site I regularly connect to.)