17 Years. Then Gone.

I had a Facebook account for 17 years.

I used it for everything — selling cars, messaging my new love across the globe, stalking old friends in the best possible way, and finding those oddly specific groups that are genuinely gold. Old boat manuals. Neurodivergent resources when our family felt completely lost. That stuff was real, and it mattered.

We all jumped on innocently enough, and for a while it genuinely delivered.

But somewhere along the way the deal changed. We became the product. Everything we clicked, lingered on, or reacted to fed an ever-improving algorithm — one designed not to serve us, but to keep us on the platform longer and sell us things with unsettling precision.

About four years ago, Su Nyein and I made a quiet decision to stop posting — for us, and honestly, for our kids too. We asked ourselves a hard question: why do we actually post? One valid reason was keeping distant family in the loop, but beyond that we struggled to find many others — except maybe the small hit you get when someone likes or comments. We figured we could find another way to keep family connected.

We still used the platforms — mostly for groups we genuinely cared about — but we stopped performing. Stopped contributing our lives to the feed. Eventually though, even that felt like too much. The tricks they play to pull you back in got harder to ignore.

So after years of sitting with it, we both permanently deleted our Facebook accounts.

Even the process to delete your account is designed to keep you. Every screen a last attempt to change your mind. The psychology machine working right until the end.

Here's what happened:

Did the sky fall in? No. Could we still function? Yes. For a little while you catch yourself picking up the phone out of habit, thumb hovering, ready to scroll into nothing. But that reflex fades faster than you'd expect.

What surprised us most was this — when you catch up with friends now, there's actually something to talk about. It's nice not knowing everything they've been up to. We came back from a holiday recently and got to tell people about it. Watch their faces. Answer questions. It sounds small but it felt like something we'd forgotten.

You don't miss what you don't know. The things that truly matter find their way to you. And when you're curious about something, you go looking for it yourself — rather than outsourcing that decision to a platform whose only real interest is your attention.

Do I miss it?

Hell no — way less than I expected. I just wish I'd done it years ago.

I'm sharing this because it might just strike a chord — though it won't be for everyone, and that's okay. But if you've been sitting on the fence, maybe this is the nudge. You might be surprised how little you lose, and how much you get back.

Peter Lloyd