Back to Basics - Leaving Facebook

In the few days since I deactivated my Facebook account, I've noticed my reading and writing volume and desire has increased substantially.  My abandonment of the giant social outlet wasn't calculated or even thought about.  I was simply sitting at my laptop, writing schedules and answering athletes' emails and went to write another stupid narcissistic post on FB and suddenly realized how bogged down I had gotten by the tediousness of the site.  I sat back in my rickety chair and tried to remember the last interesting thing I learned on FB other than voyeurism is alive and well.  I couldn't think of one thing.  That lead me to dwell on the "friends" I had accumulated over the last year or so, 722 of them.  Realistically, I have, a handful, a dozen at most.  I'm also aware that a few of my FB friends have made several negative comments about me in public.  Unfortunately, I was too weak to "defriend" them for fear of the confrontation, mostly.  So, I simply deactivated my account.

I was immediately swathed in both relief and anxiety.  Why anxiety?  I felt that the loss of FB would be a huge dent in my reach in a marketing sense.  I would lose contact with potential clients and clinic attendees.  It's a risk I'll take.

What have I found since releasing myself from Facebook?  I guess you could say I've found myself again.  I used to write A LOT.  I used to read A LOT.  I used to think A LOT.  I see now that the abundant time I spent staring at FB with my eyes glassed over from the banality of information rotating by like an assembly line of mundane daily existence was sucking both the time and creativity from me.  Oh, I'm not saying it was just the boring substance I was reading; it was also my own boring contribution to the assembly line of posts.  I was getting disgusted with my own posts.  It was like putting on an ugly sweater and only noticing just how stupid you looked when you were already out in public.

So, yeah, I'll lose an audience to whom I promote my business but I've gained so much in return.  I have more time to devote to athletes I coach.  I've been reading a lot more.  I've been thinking about a ton of topics to write about.  I've been writing more.  I also noticed that traffic on my blog is up 300% since dropping FB, something I never considered.  It seems that my daily drivels on Facebook not only took away my drive to write more meaningful things on my site but it also diluted anyone's interest in reading further than the two-sentence self promotion posts I was splattering on my FB page.

All in all it's been a good thing, leaving Facebook.  See you around, "friends".