In their place we have actual friends. Real people that we play Cards Against Humanity with. Who understand that IBS means me dashing off and having my wife play my hands for a few hours. Then we go out and have a good time.
If it's a choice between virtual existence and not-existing virtually, but living, as Moses said, "Choose life."
But the point of leaving facebook is to stop fueling their power and control over our lives, so having an account to check occasionally is self-defeating here, both for you and us.
This sentiment -- that there are people with whom you "need" to stay in contact with, through social media, alone -- comes up in every one of these discussions. The question I have to ask is: if you have relationships that are ONLY facilitated by Facebook, how much can they really mean?
What I realized, only after several months of going without Facebook, was that I was spending a non-zero amount of energy thinking about people that I had only a residual Facebook relationship with. I would occasionally look in on people who I went to college with (25 years ago) to see what they were up to, even though we haven't spoken for 23 or 24 years. And far from being deviant, I realized that this use case is a large part of the attractiveness of the service.
There are still moments I think, "I should share this on... Oh," but they're becoming more and more rare. The upside is that I find that my mind is much more calm since finally getting out of the social media game. The lives of people I have no other contact with no longer concern me, and this is the way it should be.
If you haven't spoken to someone for 10 or 20 years (and have no intention of resuming a real relationship), isn't it appropriate to stop spending time and energy keeping up with their lives? This "feature" of society has only been possible within the past 10 years, with ubiquitous smart phones and internet access. I find it's a burden that I think people just haven't realized they're lugging around.
It's not that impossible to be "off the grid" so to speak. The vast majority of Facebook interaction I see is pretty banal anyway. I don't feel like I'm missing out on anything.
What email provider do you use?
FB already separated the messenger from the main service. I'd love to see them spin off the event invitations into a separate service, too. That I would happily use.
What I realized is that it's a social crutch. I've live in the same town for 13 years and I don't know nearly as many people here as I should by now...largely because I could fall back on people I've known since college.
It gives you an out to avoid forming new friendships because your distant friends are so accessible. At least for me I realized it was.
Now I'm making more of an effort to correct that.
The key is just limiting how much time you spend on there. Not installing the mobile app or Messenger helps.
Sometime around when I turned 30 people just stopped posting anything. Nowadays my feed is people I once knew in high school posting photos of their kids and my teenage cousin posting memes.
I can go weeks without checking the feed and miss nothing. I'm not going to shut down my account, a huge part of my 20's are stored there (holiday photos from multiple overseas trips etc) but I'm a very infrequent user nowadays.
Same as it is easier to learn something new than unlearning something you know.
At the very least move to something that's not owned by facebook. Preferably not an app on a pocket-computer that can be used as a phone.