I stopped using Facebook a couple months ago. The weirdest things started happening.

Why would I stop?

I stopped using because I realized I was spending more time arguing with people than producing anything of value. More thought was going into rebutting someone of different viewpoints than doing the things I enjoy like writing or photography.

Facebook still serves a very valuable use case in my life. It allows me to keep a central location that I can check on for any of my friends and family. It is that social hub for my non-daily life. Businesses also tend to respond a little better if you post on their Facebook page than if you just attempt to contact them via email.

My quitting of "the Facebook" wasn't a grand gesture. I didn't close my account. I still have it. I didn't proclaim to people that I was leaving. I just stopped using the app, and logging in on the web.

That's when the weirdness started happening....

Withdrawals?

I am in the camp of people that think that social media is made to be addictive. When I quit smoking one of the biggest things I had to get used to was not having the ritual of smoking. You have to retrain your mind so that you don't always unconsciously grab that cigarette out of the pack.

When I quit smoking, I kept an extra pack in my junk drawer. For me, it was like that mental reminder that if I ever wanted a cigarette, I could always just grab one. It was my choice not to smoke. It was the extra power I needed to overcome my addiction.

In many ways, the Facebook app worked the same way. It started to become a reminder that I could check back at any time I wanted. However, I was making a choice not to.

So many mornings and evenings the first thing I would do is just pick up my phone, and automatically go to Facebook. It was that first app. It's quite jarring when you stop that automatic behavior. As soon as you see your phone's home screen, you have to put a mental block up not to click the Facebook button.

So, that's how it went for about the first month. I had to push myself away from the app. I started only checking what I would get notified about to see if it was something that someone needed me to have an action on.

From three weeks to a month the withdrawal symptoms start to subside. What happens at that point is quite odd on Facebook's side.

You start getting notifications for stuff you never had before.

Do you want to buy a turkey deep frier? I know I didn't. I never used the marketplace, and probably never will. Still didn't stop me from starting to get marketplace notifications all the time. Every day I was getting notifications about new things sold in my area.

After that, I started getting notifications of people posting photos just of themselves. I wasn't tagged in them. I guess I just talked to them more than my other friends on Facebook. So Facebook decided that they were going to send me a notification that this person was uploading pictures.

After that, it was notifications that people were updating their statues. Yeah, I got notifications that people were just updating their statues. Had nothing to do with me. I wasn't tagged in them, and it wasn't of stuff that I had in common with them most of the time. I did notice one thing about these notifications. Facebook tended to notify me about the people I tended to specifically argue with on Facebook more. I didn't get nearly as many notifications from people that I would just comment on, and not argue with.

Facebook has now resorted to sending me notifications when two friends of mine are now just having a conversation. Once again nothing to do with me. They are just talking to each other, and I get notified.

Here is an example of a current notification list I have.

If you look through the notification list. You can see that only one notification has to deal with me, and the only reason that one does is that is a shotgun blast to all friends.

I also get that there are a million notification settings I could turn on or off. However, my whole point was not to spend more time on Facebook. But just to stop using it altogether.

I pretty much stopped missing Facebook altogether.

One day I realized that I would go multiple days without even thinking about Facebook until my wife would mention something. It was then that I realized that my life at the time is happier without Facebook.

It doesn't mean that I will never go back. It just means for right now. Not feeling the need to have the added stress of Facebook. Is higher than the value of staring at the statuses of friends and family.