Moving Beyond Loss Aversion

I came across this post by Cal Newport the other day and it brought some clarity to some self-examination I’ve been doing around why I want to quit facebook now, why I’ve wanted to for years, and why I haven’t actually pulled the trigger until now. The whole post is worth a read but this paragraph sums up where I’ve been nicely:

Even people who are fed up with the deprivations of the algorithmic attention economy are often reluctant to give up services like social media because doing so might lead them to lose some benefits. Loss aversion teaches them to avoid such losses at all costs.

It was just easier to avoid the potential loss than come up with ways to replace the value and make up for the losses that might come.  There is a lot to process with the post as a whole but I just wanted to quick post this as a start.  For me, facebook has to go. I’ll wait and see what happens next and what else might need to go.

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