For those of you who follow this blog on Facebook, you may have noticed the page is no longer active. That’s because last week I made the decision to deactivate my Facebook.

I don’t think I need to go into the details about why my trust in Facebook has been waning, so I won’t.

I will say that this move has been a long time coming regardless of any privacy concerns. Long before Cal Newport popularized the concept of Digital Minimalism, I had already made the decision to remove social media apps from my phone in an effort to be intentional with how I spent my time and attention.

Not having Facebook on my phone changed how I thought about the service. I stopped seeing it as a place to mindlessly scroll through friends’ updates. Instead, I came to rely on Facebook for event discovery. Whenever I had a free afternoon, I’d use it to look through nearby events and inevitably find one or two that looked interesting enough to check out. For that purpose alone it was great. Unfortunately, over time the quality of events declined, and I found myself back to mindlessly scrolling through events just as I used to do with status updates. Eventually, I stopped using it for events as well.

Over time, with no real use for it, Facebook faded into the background. I almost never felt a need to check in to see what others were posting or post my own updates, and because I wasn’t checking in regularly, friend requests, event invites, and all the other ways people can reach me often went unanswered until someone mentioned them to me in person.

Whenever this happened, I did my best to explain that I wasn’t ignoring them intentionally – I just didn’t check Facebook regularly, but it turns out when people see that you have a social media account, there’s an expectation that you use it to be social. Eventually, I switched to saying that I didn’t use Facebook at all, but that usually fell flat. Once someone searched for me and saw my account pop up, it seemed as if I was lying to them.

I grew tired of trying to justify how I did or didn’t use Facebook. I came to the conclusion that the only way I could stop people from thinking I was hiding things from them (which a few did) was to deactivate my account entirely. I put it off for months, hoping there’d be another way, but really more concerned that it’d be too much of a hassle.

How would I share pictures with people without Facebook?

How would I find out about events – both from nearby locations and from friends?

It turns out none of these were actual issues.

For starters, it turns out Facebook isn’t the only way to share photos. Messages, AirDrop, and iCloud work just fine.

I also realized that I can keep up with nearby events and family and friends through Instagram. Yes, I know Instagram is owned by Facebook. No, I’m not thrilled about it, but unlike Facebook, Instagram does serve a need for me, and it’s not just to broadcast my life.

Instagram gives me a platform to share my life in a creative way. Because my account is public, I pay more attention to what I share, and more importantly who I share on it. For example, I try to avoid sharing faces of friends and family as much as possible, which has encouraged me to come up with some very clever ways of capturing the moment (e.g. shadows doing something cool instead of the actual people) that I’d otherwise not have thought about.

As for my friends’ events, I wasn’t checking Facebook regularly as it was, yet somehow I still managed to find out about their events. Once again, Messages and in-person conversations work just fine.

All in all, I feel like a weight has been lifted since I deactivated my account. I have no regrets whatsoever, and I’ve not missed it one bit. I’m not going to stand on a soapbox and say you should stop using Facebook as well, but if you are on the fence, it may be worth reconsidering why you’re sticking around.

If nothing else, my hesitancy in deactivating Facebook painted a worrisome picture. Using Facebook has become so ingrained in the daily life of most people that I actually felt as though I should keep using it for others even when I was no longer getting any use out of it.