Breaking the Cycle. Why we are leaving Facebook.

This time last year we brought together City Silence, Mindful Music Moments and True Body Project into one communication stream: The Well. We created this FOMO graphic to lead our intentions in building a more mindful communication strategy. As we revisit this a year later, during a time when we are spending more time online than ever, we have decided that what is best for us as humans and as a business is to move The Well off Facebook.

When building our mindful communication strategy, we were largely looking at the work of Tristan Harris, president and co-founder of the Center for Humane technology and a former design ethicist at Google. His seminal 2017 Ted Talk, “How a handful of Tech companies control billions of minds everyday”, exposed how tech companies run on an “attention economy”, which is the collective human capacity to engage with the many elements in our environments that demand mental focus. This drive to capture our attention is creating a race to the bottom of our brain stem.

More recently Tristan Harris spoke with David of Rebel Wisdom on “Can truth survive big tech?” Harris said, “Instead of people being paid to generate content, like journalists who cost hundred thousand dollars a year to generate content, what if we [social media] could convince each person to be their own media channel and do that labor for free? So now suddenly we’re all the free uber drivers of the attention economy. We are driving around attention and making the platforms more addictive for other people because they are seeing content from their friends. So it’s this kind of ponzi scheme where we are all contributing by posting things that keep other people addicted to the platform.”

From a mindfulness perspective, we are aware that our response to this dopamine driving platform creates a steady alarm signal to the mind/body that is processed the same as fear. We can’t distinguish on a physiological basis “anticipation” from “fear” so we are operating every day on high alert and the toll on our ability to plan, discern, empathize and exhale is highly compromised. We know that this election cycle will be a pinnacle of the deleterious effect of the platform.

We hope that you will follow along to see where this social experiment takes us. Subscribe to our newsletter, follow us on instagram (yes we know IG is owned by Facebook, baby steps!) and twitter to get the most up to date news, events and blogs.

We can’t wait to meet you in the field of experience.

Additional Resources

Documentaries and Talks:

The Great Hack

Social Dilemma

Tristan Harris Ted Talk

Ten Arguments for Deleting Your Social Media Accounts Right Now by Jaron Lanier

How to navigate leaving Facebook:

How to download all Facebook page content.

How to remove Facebook access to thrid party apps

How to delete or deactivate your Facebook account.