'Forty Days Off Facebook' Urges Readers to Reflect, Reconnect

Ryan Beale hopes his new book "Forty Days Off Facebook: A Pivotal Journey" will inspire readers to turn inward and reconnect with themselves and their families.

"Forty Days Off Facebook" began as a personal experiment following the Huntington Woods resident's divorce and his brother's suicide, both in 2009. Realizing the social networking site provided an addictive distraction from truly processing the experiences, Beale decided to log out and record his reflections in a journal.

The resulting book documents Beale's season of loss and healing in a quick, thought-provoking read about the nature of self and family in a digital society. 

"2010 was the hardest year of my life. I was running so fast to not have to feel the agony I had just gone through," said Beale, a Michigan State University graduate who works in commercial real estate and lived in Illinois at the time. "I would wake up and look over the horizon in my downtown Chicago apartment, drinking my coffee, half naked in front of the computer. I started my day trying to connect with the rest of the world instead of trying to take a moment to connect with myself."

Full disclosure: Beale, who identifies himself as a social activist, also is the founder of chattertree.com, a website that offers private discussion rooms and multimedia image sharing for families, as well as Pure Mental Graffiti, an entrant in the 2011 Pepsi Refresh Project, which aimed to fight the stigma of mental illness through awareness-building events.

"I saw social networking was the wave of the future and I was very passionate about using it to go inward to the heart of the family," Beale said. "That's one thing I really want to bring attention to is the family system. When one person is struggling with mental health, it affects the whole family."

However, Beale said he is concerned the voyeuristic, competitive nature of Facebook is eroding people's ability to form meaningful interpersonal relationships.

"People have a habit of using Facebook as a way to convince themselves and the people that they are connected with that everything is just great, even when their world is falling apart," Beale writes. "It's difficult to show honesty about your inner feelings with such a large audience of friends and skeptics; especially if you have an image you are trying to maintain."

So, on Nov. 19, 2010, he posted this status update: "Taking forty days off Facebook to connect. If you want to reach me just give me a call or e-mail me. – All the best."

Beale was not alone in his decision.

The Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project found in a report released earlier this year that 61 percent of Facebook users have, at some time, taken a voluntary break from the website for a period of several weeks or more, citing a variety of reasons including being too busy, a lack of interest, too much negativity, the site being a waste of time and preferring to communicate in "real life."

Beale's break marked the anniversaries of his brother Steve's suicide, the last meal they shared, Beale's divorce and his wedding. It also provided an opportunity for self-reflection and deeper interactions with people, including visits with family members and meeting his current wife Louise, with whom Beale is expecting his first child this summer.

"Once the 40 days were up, I found the relationships I had with people were becoming much more meaningful and fulfilling," Beale said. "I found myself calmer, more confident in taking on challenges, and I had come to terms with my grief.”


Excerpts: "Forty Days Off Facebook"

• "Facebook is teaching us how to create subtle judgements of each other in an instant, sidetracking us from the true journey of what makes us human and numbing our spiritual side. Our privacy is going to be sold to the highest bidder and we are going to be tracked in ways we never could have imagined 10 years ago."
  
• "If I had not answered the phone call from my brother Sam calling to tell me about Steve's passing, I would have heard the news via a Facebook wall post. The thought of that still makes me shiver." 
  
• "My hope is one day, when I have kids, they will understand that there was once a time that the family sat and had dinner together with no interruptions. There was once a time that a heartfelt moment was embraced and not just 'shared' through social media. More importantly, it is those moments that we may forget about in the future that added the real spiritual value to our sense of being."