The best thing about quitting Facebook, I have discovered, has been the platform’s increasingly frantic efforts to win me back. It has been two months since I last checked my feed, during which time Facebook has sent me notifications I didn’t sign up for, informing me every time someone posts, and invited me to attend locally organised focus groups. Ignoring these overtures has given me at least as much pleasure as checking the site ever did.

Of course, I am anthropomorphising a machine; no one is in charge of all this. But the small satisfaction of imagining the behemoth scratching its head and wondering how anyone can resist the invitation to get sucked back in is immense. As is this: the sense of new acres of mind opening up.

I wish I could say I was spending the time saved reading self-improving books, but I’m mainly reinvesting it in television. Still, when I turn around to look at what, if anything, I miss about Facebook, all I find is relief and genuine shock at how I came to spend so much time looking at the holiday photos of people I haven’t seen for 25 years.

At the same time, this feels deeper than a mere question of time management. It feels like the restoration of a natural order, in which memory, rather than being kept artificially alive, is allowed to fade, putting people in one’s past firmly back where they belong, to be picked up occasionally and dusted off for nostalgia and then returned once again to the shelf.

It also, surely, frees up space to move on. Since the term “mental load” has entered the mainstream, it has become apparent just how much time and energy many of us spend thinking about what in isolation seem to be small, insignificant details – mostly to do with chores and schedules – but that increasingly I think should be used to cover the sheer amount of junk that social media puts into our brains.

When I think, now, about how much of my mental hard drive was taken up at any given time by what I’d just read on Facebook, it was clearly a madness. The site was almost always the last thing I looked at before leaving the house, so that by default, if I wasn’t sitting and scrolling, I was thinking about what I’d just seen while sitting and scrolling, while in a bleary fugue state.

And while I don’t expect to have great thoughts on the way to the supermarket, it would be nice to feel that my mind is at least vaguely free-range. As it was, I only now realise two months out, it was rigged by habitual use almost always to float back to the feed.

Last weekend I went to the wedding of one of my oldest friends and saw a lot of people I hadn’t seen for a while. It was a very happy experience and, although this sounds trite, it was noticeable how going somewhere and seeing people was an antidote to the grey brain-state of life on social media, and that by not sharing it was somehow made the more precious.

• Emma Brockes is a Guardian columnist based in New York