A Facebook-less month

"You now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?"

-Dana Gioia, the former Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, Stanford Commencement 2007.

2007. Twitter hadn't taken off yet. Facebook was still mostly used by people under 25. But Gioia hit on something crucial as he sent off Stanford grads from the insulated walls of a place where conversations about pop culture were often second to those on literature, politics, technology, and ideas. How do we spend our free time?

I wrote down this quote after reading his speech. It resonated deeply with me as someone just a few years out of college and feeling like I was spending a lot of time sitting at my desk, staring at a screen.

I came across the quote again in December as I was cleaning out some old papers. Then I decided that in 2012 I wanted to spend less time staring at a screen. I started with the goal of only checking Facebook once a month. Facebook, for me, is a giant time suck as I go on to check messages and end up trolling people's lives when I could have spent that time calling up a friend, baking cookies, writing a blog post, going for a run, etc.

I checked Facebook accidentally on January 1, and posted on my wall before remembering that it was 2012 and I was only checking Facebook once a month. Whoops. So for the next 30 I days, I didn't log in. It took some getting used to. When I open up my computer, I generally check my e-mail and facebook, and then my favorite news sources. I had to stop myself from clicking on the URL. I wondered if I was being tagged in any pictures. I wondered if anyone was friending me. I wondered if anyone had sent me an important message, not knowing about my little experiment. I thought of things to post about and really great, witty status updates. I wondered what I was missing out on.

But then I stopped thinking about my life in terms of status updates. I stopped feeling the need to check out what my friends were up to. I knew I was missing out on little bits of information. But that was part of the point. I don't need that information to live a full life.

Was the Facebook hiatus worth it? Absolutely. January was a fabulous month. I had lunch dates and coffee dates and dinner dates and phone dates with the people that are important to me. I thought more about how I could be a producer, instead of a consumer. I made thank you notes and wrote in my journal. I made lots of different soups and really good chocolate chip cookies. I tried my hand at making toffee. To be sure, I was still a consumer. But I did things like read The New Yorker or catch up on past episodes of NPR's Fresh Air and Wait Wait Don't Tell Me.

But more than any of that, I noticed that I had lot less anxiety. There's this feeling that I get in my stomach when I see a group of friends in a picture at an event that I didn't know about. It's a mix between jealousy and self-pity that leads to bigger questions like "do people really like me?" In moments of low self-eestem, suddenly Facebook becomes a catalyst for my sense of self worth.

I know it's not Facebook's fault that I tend to have lower self-eestem when I check my account. But the truth is, that feeling in my stomach is not an accurate reflection of the reality of my life. I have amazing friends. I work in an amazing profession. I live in an amazing city. I live a very meaningful life. For now, Facebook is a distraction to that meaningful life that carried on just fine for 30 days without so much of a glimpse of my "news feed." Here's to living life as an active citizen that lives a meaningfully life outside of any online social network.