What I Learned By Logging Off

On seven years away from Facebook, and what it taught me about the relationships that actually hold weight.

Seven years ago, I deactivated my Facebook account. It wasn't a dramatic decision — no manifesto, no announcement, nobody noticed for weeks. I just quietly logged off and stayed off. Part of it was a hunch, almost an experiment: if I took away the easy version of staying in touch, would the real version get stronger? Would I actually call people? Would they call me? Or would we just quietly drift, the way people do when the only thing holding a friendship together turns out to be a mutual habit of scrolling past each other's lives?

I didn't know the answer going in. That was the point of doing it — I wasn't trying to prove a thesis, I was trying to find one out.

I stayed on LinkedIn. I stayed on Instagram. Those had their own purposes, and I never felt the same pull to walk away from them. But Facebook — the place built specifically for keeping up with everyone at once, for compressing a thousand relationships into one scrollable feed — I walked away from entirely, and I didn't look back for a long time.

I recently logged back in. Not for me — to build a business page for Benda & Co. And logging back in after seven years is a strange thing. It's a little like opening a box of photographs you forgot you owned. Some of it you're relieved to see again. Some of it you wish you'd seen sooner.

What I avoided

I'll say this plainly: I don't regret the seven years, and I want to be honest about why. I never saw a single COVID post — not one, from any side of that argument, at any point during the years it consumed almost every feed in the country. I missed the pile-ons, the group chats that turned into group fights, the outrage cycles that seem to reset every few days with a new target and the same shape. I missed a lot of noise, and noise, it turns out, is easier to live without than I expected.

There's something clarifying about not knowing what four hundred people think about something that has nothing to do with your actual life. Opinions I never had to weigh. Arguments I never had to referee, even silently, even just by reading them. I got quieter years because of it. I got more present ones too, I think — more attention available for the people actually across the table from me, because I wasn't carrying around a running tally of everyone who wasn't.

That part of the experiment, I'd call a success. But it wasn't the whole experiment, and I think it's worth resisting the temptation to stop the story there, because the honest version doesn't stop there.

What I Missed

I missed things too. Real things. Engagements. Births. Illnesses. Moves. Vacations. The small print of people's lives — the updates that don't warrant a phone call on their own, the ones nobody sits down and specifically decides to tell you, but that add up over years to actually knowing someone. Where their kids go to school now. That they lost a parent. That they'd moved twice. That kind of thing rarely gets a phone call of its own. It gets a post, and if you're not there to see the post, it just doesn't reach you. Nobody calls to catch you up on the ordinary parts of their life — that's exactly what the feed was for.

I found out about some of it late. Some of it I found out about not at all, and only realized the gap when I logged back in and started scrolling through seven years I hadn't lived through with anyone — seven years where other people's lives kept moving at their normal pace while mine, from their side of the screen, must have looked frozen, or absent, or simply gone.

"You don't just lose the noise. You lose some real signal too."

Chris Benda, Founder, Benda & Co.

That's the trade nobody tells you about going in, and it's the part I underestimated. The platform never bothered to separate the two for you — it just handed you both, all day, every day, and left you to sort it out yourself. Opting out doesn't solve that sorting problem. It just moves it: instead of the feed doing the work of keeping people loosely in touch, it falls to an actual phone call, an actual text, something somebody has to think to send.

A Note on Staying Reachable

A feed isn't nothing. It's a real way of staying loosely connected to people you care about, and I gave that up more completely than I probably needed to.

If a relationship went quiet these last seven years, that's not a verdict on anyone else. It's just what happens when you remove yourself from the easiest way people had of finding you.

The Relationships Built one at a Time

Here's what I noticed, though, once I looked back at those seven years honestly: the friendships that stayed strong were the ones where somebody picked up the phone. Where I did, or they did. Where the relationship got maintained the slow way, one conversation at a time, because the easy way wasn't available. That doesn't mean the other relationships didn't matter — they did, and I'm still sorting through what it cost me to miss parts of them. A feed isn't nothing. It's a real way of staying loosely connected to people you care about, and I gave that up more completely than I probably needed to. But I noticed something true anyway: the handful of relationships I maintained the hard way, on purpose, became different than the ones I let the platform maintain for me. Not better in every case. Just different — closer, maybe, because closeness was the only tool I had left.

When the easy option disappears, you either let the relationship fade or you do the harder thing on purpose. There's no third option, no passive way to stay close. That's uncomfortable, and it's also, I think, exactly right.

This is how I practice too

I didn't set out to build a wealth management firm around this idea, but looking back, I think I did anyway. Benda & Co. isn't built to manage relationships at the scale a feed allows. It's built the slow way — one client, one conversation, one actual phone call at a time. That's not a marketing line. It's an operational choice with real trade-offs, the same trade-offs I lived through on Facebook. I can't reach a thousand households with an update posted once and forgotten. I have to actually call. I have to actually remember what's going on in your life without a feed to remind me — your wedding anniversary celebration, buying your dream home, the trip to see your favorite musician, the fact that you mentioned six months ago you were thinking about retiring early.

"Nobody calls a feed when something in your life actually happens. They call us."

Chris Benda, Founder, Benda & Co.

That takes more effort than broadcasting ever would, and it means I'll always work with fewer families than a firm built around the feed model could. I've made peace with that trade, the same way I eventually made peace with the one I made seven years ago. It's slower. It doesn't scale the way a broadcast does. But it's the only version of this work that holds weight when something in your life actually happens — a death, a diagnosis, a sale, a decision you can't make alone.

What I avoided Seven years without outrage cycles, pile-ons, or a single COVID post. Noise turned out to be easy to live without.	What i Missed Engagements, births, illnesses, moves, vacations — the small print of people's lives that never warranted a call of its own.	How I practice One client, one conversation, one phone call at a time. Slower, and the only version that holds weight when it matters.

And the only way I get to be that person, for as many of you as I actually can, is by doing this the hard way, on purpose, one relationship at a time.

Seven years off Facebook taught me that. I'm glad I learned it, even though — especially because — I paid a real cost to find it out.

Chris Benda, Founder, Benda & Co.

Chris Benda is an investment adviser representative with Savvy Advisors, Inc. (“Savvy Advisors”). Savvy Advisors is an SEC registered investment advisor. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the speakers and authors and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Savvy Advisors. Information contained herein has been obtained from sources believed to be reliable, but are not assured as to accuracy.

Material prepared herein has been created for informational purposes only and should not be considered investment advice or a recommendation. Information was obtained from sources believed to be reliable but was not verified for accuracy.‍Savvy Wealth Inc. is a technology company. Savvy Advisors, Inc. is an SEC registered investment advisor. For purposes of this article, Savvy Wealth and Savvy Advisors together are referred to as “Savvy”. All advisory services are offered through Savvy Advisors, while technology is offered through Savvy Wealth. The views and opinions expressed herein are those of the speakers and authors, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Savvy Advisors.