The revelations about Cambridge Analytica’s harvest of Facebook data signalled the end of the end for me.

The beginning of the end had come a year or so earlier when I deleted the Facebook app from my phone (yes, I reinstalled it; I’ll deal with the addiction shortly) because I felt it had become an unhealthy compulsion – somewhere between not being able to stop eating one of those huge buckets of synthetic-buttery popcorn at the cinema and hating yourself for watching Midsomer Murders week after week after week.

I was a late adopter of Facebook, having opened an account before leaving it mostly dormant for years. I’m a cyber Luddite and didn’t quite know what to do once I’d opened it. The whole “Like” thing I found as pointless and empty as making friends with people I’d never – and had no special desire to – meet. Still, I let them all in.

The Cambridge Analytica files: the story so far Read more

So by the time I’d actually engaged I’d already friended hundreds of people I didn’t know at all. Once I started posting I was soon checking the app on my phone dozens – perhaps more – times a day, especially after I’d shared a pic of my dogs, something I’d written or something I’d read that I thought friends (real or virtual) would like.

The little thumbs-up (and eventually other emojis) were a drug. But why has so-and-so (who I’ve never met but who I know lives alone with her seven corgis and is obsessed with Claire Foy) suddenly stopped liking every one of my posts? Did the depression finally win over? And why doesn’t such and such, who I am actually real life mates with, ever – ever! – like my stuff? What sort of friend are they?

Still, I didn’t need my kids’ encouragement to resist (with a couple of exceptions) posting about them; I compensated with dozens of pics of my dogs who, in any event, often seem to like me more. One of the things that shat me to tears about Facebook from day one was the way real and virtual friends boasted about the unparalleled genius of their children with violins, golf clubs, diabolos, any and every ball, skis, chemistry assignments, fashion and speech night orations – about how they were the most loving, giving, responsive children in the universe who always cleaned their rooms, looked like angels when they slept, had breath like fresh vanilla beans, emptied the dishwasher without being asked, walked and talked at nine months, always said thank you and by the way I really, really love you Mum and Dad, washed their own clothes, got straight A-pluses, and never projectile vomited onto the ceiling, got caught up with a dodgy crowd, got busted underage by the cops or lost in the dark tunnel of adolescence.

We are all, the kids I’ve helped raise included, exceptional in some way – or so it’s said. But if I told the truth about mine on Facebook (“Yeah I came eleventh – whatevs ...”; “I told you – I hate Osso-Bucco with risotto Milanese.”; “There’s no icecream ... and by the way, did you know your generation has wrecked the world?”; “Stop asking – I’ll shower on the weekend.”; “Dad, did you ever wish you were born into a different family – just asking?”) they’d seem diminished.

Then there are all of those perfect, seamless marriages, lived in architecturally flawless citadels to emotional, financial and familial success, with enviously curated interiors and perched by water or bucolic bush. Facebook can give you that, it seems. It’s why I’m always so stunned to hear of the divorces and the eating disorders, the breakdowns, infidelities and addictions when real life, as is its way, eventually outs the grimy truth. Mostly they don’t post that stuff.

The pathology of both real and cyber-friends started to concern, anger – and especially – distract me. Not nearly all, of course; I’m good actual friends with people I’ve connected with on Facebook. Just as I feel I’ve lost real friends because of it, too.

“These are not really your friends,” I’d find myself saying to the image on my phone of a troubled person I did know and care about. “I wish you’d lose the desire to share with total strangers what happened in yesterday’s psychotherapy session.”

My writing habits are set in stone: 45 hours a week – more, if need be, towards the apex of a major project. I’ve never had what some call “writers’ block” – never much believed in it either. My answer has always been to stomp and slosh on through the swamp. But I’ve only ever been a Facebook compulsive during the construction of one (the latest) of my six books. And it literally distracted me off the rails a couple of times as I checked the app, again and again – a convenient out from the swamp on the screen, yes, sure, but also a repetitive impulse I desperately wanted to shelve because it shredded concentration.

Facebook was an Exocet into the bunker of my obsessive compulsions.

The ads in my feed – for dog food, arborio rice, books about history, children and violins, parenting websites – I found increasingly creepy, insidious, infuriating. The quizzes and pop psychological profiles (Which historical figure do you most resemble?) – obviously harvesting ruses – enraged me; if a friend completed and shared one, I, too, was potentially caught in the data harvest (as the CA files illustrate).

Facebook’s week of shame: the Cambridge Analytica fallout Read more

On the positive side, I found Facebook a wonderful way to connect with communities, and maintain contact with a bunch of men and women – and younger people – who I know and care about. I loved seeing what the blokes in my skiing gang are up to, maintaining close contact with the writers I know and the ease with which I could contact Indigenous people and historians with whom I align.

Already I wonder if it’s to my professional detriment. And I do miss the positives.

In the past 10 days I’ve wanted to share important articles – one about National Geographic’s truth telling on its racist past, another on a book in the Indigenous space, pulped because of serious cultural transgression. I’m doing a public event in Sydney this week with a historian I greatly admire; ordinarily I’d have shared notification about that, too. I’d like to share this on Facebook.

As someone who works alone I miss the easy interactions. But I’ll not miss the sense of emptiness and occasional anger when I considered the dross and the confected realities in my feed. At the moment it feels like liberation.

Never say never. I may yet reopen a properly managed professional page.

But meanwhile, friends know where to find me.