Could you leave Facebook for 99 days?

We never know how we feel about Facebook these days. We’re constantly telling ourselves we hate the never-ending stream of Candy Crush invitations, invitations to club nights we’re never going to go to, because they’re in Newcastle, and the whole everyone knowing our business thing. However, we know that if we left it for a day we’d get ultimate FOMO and get straight back on it quicker than you could say Mark Zuckerberg. You could say our relationship with Facebook was ‘complicated’. Ok, we’ll stop now.

In response to the secret mood experiment that Facebook apparently undertook earlier this month, an experiment has launched that asks people to get off Facebook for 99 days to test how it affects their mood.

99 Days of Freedom asks participants to set their profile picture to a “time-off” image and then spend 99 consecutive off the site, while recording their mood at certain time intervals – 33, 66 and 99 days.

Dutch creative agency Just chose 99 days as the duration of the experiment because it was long enough to make an impact on the user’s lives but short enough so they do not get bored of the experiment.

According to Just, in those 99 days we would normally spend 28 hours on Facebook; based on research that the average user spends 17 minutes a day perusing the social media site. The hope is that participants in the experiment will find better uses of their time.

We’re pretty tempted to take part in this experiment, but we can’t, because we actually need Facebook for work. That’s the only reason we’re not taking part, it has nothing to do with our chronic case of FOMO. HONEST!