What I learned from killing my Facebook News Feed

Here's an experiment I've been trying for the last few months. It's quick, easy, completely reversible and may make you completely rethink how you use the internet.

It's called Killing Your News Feed.

I'll talk more in a moment about the reasoning behind it, but just so you know what I'm talking about, here's a link to the Kill News Feed Chrome extension. As soon as you click install, it will stop you from seeing anything where your Facebook News Feed used to be. You'll still get notifications, you can still go to people's pages, you can still post and message and do anything else you used to do – you just won't be greeted with a News Feed when you first open facebook.com.

Sweet Jesus, why would you do such a thing?

So, I've been trying to digitally declutter my life in one way or another for more than a year now. I'm a freelance writer by trade and so felt myself particularly prone to the time- and attention-sucking tendencies of this new digital age. It's hard to have original thoughts, or even unoriginal ones when you are constantly immersed in a stream of other people's noise.

I instituted a (mostly) Distraction-Free iPhone – no email, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Safari, no access to the internet's myriad rivers of infinity. (The only social media I've kept is Instagram, because it's fun and limited). I've spent hours filtering and unsubscribing my email address so that the things appearing in my inbox are actually worthwhile – new app Polymail is fantastic for this, as it has an auto-unsubscribe button that does all the work for you.

I then tried a few different extensions to try and limit my use of Facebook and Twitter, the most successful of which was Stayfocusd, an app that requires you to set an amount of time you're willing to use on various sites each day – I went for 20 minutes – and then starts counting down the moment you open them in a tab. It always provided a low-grade thrill when you found yourself trying to fire off one more FB message with 7 seconds to go, but as I needed to use Facebook for professional purposes it became more hassle than it was worth.

Then I read this article.

Basically it sets out in excruciating detail how apps like Facebook and Twitter are designed to hijack our monkey brains, in a way almost entirely identical to poker machines. If you've ever got to the top of your News Feed and pulled down just so that it delivered you a few more posts, you'll realise how apt the analogy is. It's low-risk gambling with our mental space as currency.

The whole article is unnerving, but what I objected to most was the feeling that my thoughts were being hijacked by forces well beyond my control: that god of the digital age, algorithm. When we dip our toes into something like Facebook's News Feed, we are being dragged willingly or not into debates and arguments and contemplations that we have no personal investment in – until we see them appear in front of us. Then our brains, wired as they are, force an emotional engagement. Suddenly you realise you do have an opinion on the Taylor Swift/Kanye West spat, you are outraged about the killing of a gorilla named Harambe, it is a tragedy what's happening in Venezuela, and on and on, ad infinitum. All of this is made worse by the mob mentalities that power Facebook – the more things are shared, the more you're forced to take a stand, to consider it all as if they were your own thoughts and cares and wants.

There's a great adage that applies to most creative endeavours – the audience doesn't know what you're not giving them. It's a reminder for creators to kill their darlings, because the audience will only engage with what you're putting in front of their face. They don't know they're missing out on X because they never knew X existed. But in the Facebook age – of which we are definitely an audience – less and less is being held back. The spectacle of the News Feed is full to bursting, because the more content it contains, the more we engage – productively, positively and healthily or not.

The world is a big, complex, tragic place. But us individuals, for all our best intentions, only have a finite amount of care and attention to give. That's just how human brains work. Every time that care and attention is hijacked by something on Facebook, some mindless, distant spat or celebrity furore, we have less of it to give elsewhere – to our work, to our families, to our friends, to our communities (online and off), to the people who exist within the zone we recognise as everyday life. To ourselves, our independent thoughts and our own place in the world.

So, what's it feel like to go without Facebook's News Feed?

Well, it's easier than expected. You soon realise how much communication is conducted off Facebook these days – through WhatsApp, through email, even through Facebook Messenger. The News Feed provides the illusion of communication and connection without actually offering it. I open a Facebook tab now, check for notifications and close it again, usually within 5 seconds. I get the things from Facebook that I actually value without the 15-minute, emotionally draining News Feed binges that used to go along with them.

You also get to be the fun guy at parties who hasn't actually heard about something that happened online. It's a lot of fun discovering things in the moment, rather than replying with "Oh yeah, I saw that. Crazy."

Like all good addicts, you never quite get past the feeling of how easy and nice it would be to go back in. I mean, just for a moment. Just to see what's happening. Just in case there's been some event you absolutely, 100% have to know about right now and if you don't you'll be on the outer. But after a few months and god knows how many hours of News Feed that I haven't seen, I'm glad to say that the number of times this has happened is precisely 0.

I'm not going to finish this post by claiming that killing your News Feed is some miracle cure for distraction, or an instant panacea for productivity, or a surefire way of revolutionising your life. But it's a small, quiet and low-cost gesture you can make to try and reclaim some mental independence. And as we become more and more enmeshed in the digital systems around us, I reckon those sort of spaces are going to become ever more valuable.

And hey, if you don't like it, the rapturous infinity of it all is always just a few clicks away...