Confessions of a Deactivated Facebooker: Instant Feedback and Other Random Realizations

Since deactivating from my personal Facebook page over a month ago, I have had no interaction with people on Facebook other than cutting/pasting the website to my blog on my writing, or "business" page (which does not allow me to view anyone's personal profile, the "likes" simply mean my updates show up in their feed). If you don't manage a "fan" or business page, you may not know there is a huge difference between that and a personal profile. There is potential for interaction on the "wall" but I have held strong to my pact with myself to not do that (at least for now), and just post the links to my blogs for people to follow. As I said in a recent blog post, I have perused Casey's newsfeed on a few occasions for a few minutes at a time, which has effectively caused my total boredom with Facebook in a social way (his page is kind of a social desert, because he is never on it!). This is what I have learned about why this total and utter boredom has happened (along some other random realizations about my journey being unplugged):

• Casey and I have just a few friends in common on Facebook, who I see regularly anyway and get their news that way. Therefore, seeing their posts come through the feed occasionally is not nearly as useful anymore, obviously, as I get the same information now in a more personal way (and vice versa). 
• My withdrawals (which were very real, and quite fascinating really) from FB were from the sudden drop of the sheer number of lack of online onversations and comment threads, not from perusing people's pages. It is much more interesting for me to TALK with people online as opposed to looking at their every thought. Delightfully, I have retained many of these conversations and switched them over to 3-D, real life, face to face hang out sessions with many people. The number of conversations has dropped dramatically but the quality is through the roof. These friends are amazing and I love them!
• I have successfully weaned myself totally from wanting to post every little (or even big) thing that happens to me, in order to get instant reactions from people. I have realized that this is one of the main things on FB I was addicted to: Immediate feedback/reactions from friends about what I was doing or thinking.

I had no idea how much I depended upon what people thought of my posts. I have had quite a few comments here in reaction to my blog posts, which I love, but are in no way equal in number to the reactions I got to 1-2 line status updates on FB. For me, this was a hard transition. Why did I care so much about what people think of my thoughts, my activities, my accomplishments? Why did I feel I needed instant feedback from people? It is fascinating.

I don't know the answer to that, but I am going to stay off FB for a little while longer to find out.

What do you think about the "instant feedback" phenomenon that Facebook has provided? Do you think this is a healthy thing?  A harmful thing? Somewhere in between?