Delete Facebook is trending in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica scandal. A lot of people are talking about deleting their Facebook accounts after it came to light that Cambridge Analytica used Facebook-provided tools and harvested personal data of nearly 50 million users. Facebook wouldn’t term what happened a data breach, but for users it doesn’t matter. Many of them are angry and are trending hashtags like #DeleteFacebook.

The hashtag has surprisingly found a lot of support from many quarters, including from WhatsApp co-founder Brian Acton who sold his company to Facebook for $19 billion a few years ago. It’s time, he tweeted in support of #DeleteFacebook.

Now this idea of deleting Facebook sounds ludicrous when you first listen to it. Facebook is such an integral part of life for so many people nowadays that it seems implausible that it can be deleted from phones. People live inside the Facebook app. For some it has become their entire social world.

But just think about it for a few minutes. Ask yourself a few question, and you will realise that deleting Facebook is not actually such a bad idea. It is not as bad as it sounds. You may even, after a few days, not notice that there used to be something like Facebook in your phone and that it took hours and hours of your time. We believe we are addicted to Facebook, and to its utility as a platform where we can share stuff. But just take a step back, and you will realise that it’s not your entire world.

Facebook started as a tool to connect with friends, share cool stuff with people who you care about. But that was a long time ago. Now the site is basically a marketing platform, more useful to journalists like me. Or a way for various brands to reach out to you. Or for the political parties and groups – love and hate both – to spread their message. Finally, it is a vanity platform. It massages your ego through Likes when you share a photo, or a status update, or check-in from a fancy restaurant. It’s superfluous. It’s not even real anymore. The kind of lives, and the kind of image that Facebook users portray of themselves on the social media site, are hardly how their lives are in the real world.

So, coming back to the delete Facebook option. Think it like this: If today Facebook vanishes from your phone and you can’t log into it anymore, what will happen. Here is what will happen, I believe for most people.

1.You will talk to your close friends through WhatsApp or any other messaging app. You will share photos and status updates in WhatsApp daily group.

2.You will forget about most of your Facebook friends in a week or so. The ones you were close to will be connecting with you on Whatsapp.

3.You will miss endlessly scrolling through Facebook news feed, you may even see your fingers looking for Facebook app on the phone. But this will last not more than a couple of days.

4.You will get less useless information. It won’t come scrolling into your thoughts. You will not know where a person who you never met went to special dinner last night. You may feel that you are missing out on something that is happening in the rest of the world. But this too will go away in a couple of days.

5.It is possible that you may feel lonely without your Facebook news feed. It is possible that you may suddenly find yourself less occupied. But believe me, this feeling too will pass. If you feel too lonely, I also believe that you will probably pick up the phone and have an actual conversation with a friend, or go out and meet people. Better in the long run I say, rather than feeding on the sugary drip drip of Facebook.

There are potential downsides of deleting Facebook. But I don’t think they matter to most people. You will get fewer advertisements. You will be bombarded with fewer useless invitations. You will have fewer silly conversations. The people who are going to be hit hard in a Facebook-less world are advertisers, journalists and politicians. Everyone else should be more or less fine.

The world of 2018 is very different from the world that was in 2010. Now, in messaging apps, which supports group messaging, there are more personal and better ways to communicate compared to what Facebook allows. Facebook now solely exists for advertisers – of different types and hues – and for the vanity of its users. Those likes that people crave have no real use for people. They just lets you feel better because you have become used to them, and lets advertisers find you. If you give them up, you may miss the Likes people give you and the Likes people take from you for a day or two, but life will go on. And after a day or two, you won’t even miss Facebook.