Why I Decided to Finally Delete My Facebook Account

I had contemplated deleting my Facebook account for over two years before I finally did, and it’s one of my best decisions. Here’s why I permanently removed my account after deactivating it for a while, and why I suggest doing the same for others.

1 Facebook Continued Getting More Toxic

Maybe Facebook was always like this and I was blissfully ignorant. But over the years, I noticed that the website got more and more toxic. I noticed my Facebook news feed getting worse after the 2016 US elections, and things reached a tipping point for me during the COVID-19 lockdowns.

It felt like people were getting more and more adversarial with people who disagreed with them, regardless of where they were on the political spectrum. I am also not immune to this because I was just as bad on Twitter and other platforms. However, I wanted to stop viewing others as enemies and have more mature conversations about sensitive topics—even if we don’t agree.

Seeing so much negativity and animosity wears you down, and I found myself in a constant state of fight or flight. Even if I was taking a backseat on Facebook, I felt like I had better things to do with my life than watching others type angry words at each other through a screen. Deleting Facebook subsequently helped me stop doomscrolling on social media.

2 I Wanted to Remove a Lot of People From My Life

While I occasionally cleaned up my Facebook account by trimming my friends list, you’ll often find friction between removing people you used to be close with. Having been on the platform since 2009, I had accumulated several “friends” that I no longer had anything in common with. And to be honest, I also had a lot of people on my friends list that I never really knew in the first place; we just happened to go to the same school or university.

I know that you can unfollow people you don’t want to unfriend and hide their posts, but it wasn’t about not seeing individuals from the past on my feed. I did not want them to know what I was doing; not because I disliked them, but because it’s none of their business.

Dunbar’s number suggests that we can only have around 150 relationships simultaneously—and while my 500 friends didn’t look like a lot on paper, it’s well above this. Rather than awkwardly deciding to keep someone on my friend’s list because I once met them at a party, I found it easier to delete my account altogether.

I did, however, make one mistake. There were some people that I genuinely cared about and would have liked to stay in contact with. In hindsight, I’d take more time before deleting my social accounts to assess who I wanted to stay in touch with (and then reach out to them).

3 I Wanted to Minimize How Many Social Media Apps I Used

In 2019, I was on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn. I was a very heavy user of each—I remember one day when I clocked up nine hours of screen time.

Being on social media seemed like the normal thing to do. If we also count MSN, I had been active across all platforms since 2007. It was hard for me to remember a time without social media, and for this reason, I never questioned whether it was negatively impacting how I interacted with the world.

While enduring a difficult time in late 2019, I decided I needed to change. During this era of intense self-improvement, I learned about reward pathways and how social media can impact this. Maintaining an open mind, I deactivated all my accounts (apart from LinkedIn) for almost a year.

After my experiment, I posted twice on Facebook; one announced my return, and the other was to say that I had moved from the UK to Denmark. Ironically, the second post made me realize that I didn’t want to be on Facebook for this new chapter (and that I was happier without it). So, I permanently deleted my Facebook account a few weeks later.

4 I Found Better (and Alternative) Ways to Contact People

People often worry that they won’t have a way to contact people without Facebook or whichever social media account they want to delete. This is a genuine concern, but thankfully, you’ve got plenty of options these days.

I was constantly worried about deleting my Facebook account because if I did, people couldn’t contact me. But if I really wanted to use Messenger, I could have just created a private and unsearchable account—and then used the Messenger app.

Lots of people are on WhatsApp (plus alternatives like Telegram), and I decided that these were much better alternatives to Facebook. Good old-fashioned text messaging and iMessage are two other options, and you can even keep in touch via Instagram.

5 I No Longer Liked How Facebook Made Me Feel

When I first joined Facebook, I saw it as a cool way to keep in touch with my friends and family. In the early days, I had largely positive views and feelings when I went on the app. But over time, things changed for the worse. Besides getting bored of the app, two other big problems arose.

Firstly, Facebook sapped my creativity. Because I was spending so much time on Facebook, I wasn’t doing anywhere near as much as I could have been with my big creative dreams and ideas. And even when I did, it was in service of social media (for example, I took photos that would get likes from my Facebook friends instead of what I actually wanted to capture).

Facebook also made me feel intense FOMO, especially when I saw how everyone else was doing. For example, I quit my job and started my first business at a time when my friends were getting job promotions. While I knew that leaving my job was the right long-term decision, I was also broke at the time. Combine that with others getting pay rises, etc., and you can see the problem here.

I also felt obliged to post whenever I did anything interesting. For example, if I was traveling, I had to tell my friends where I was going. Since deleting Facebook, I’m much happier not feeling like I need to share all of my life. This is one of the biggest mistakes you could make on Facebook.

Deleting my Facebook account was a huge decision, but I can say with certainty that it was one of my best long-term decisions. I have better relationships with the people who matter, and I’m no longer exposed to anywhere near as much negativity as I was. Not oversharing my personal life is also a huge advantage. I suggest deactivating your account for three months and seeing how you feel thereafter; if you enjoy your life offline, don’t hesitate to permanently delete it.