If you don't like Facebook, why don't you just leave?

Anger has raged since it emerged that Facebook conducted a secret psychological experiment on over half a million of its users. This fresh controversy is the latest in a list of gripes over privacy, advertising, auto-playing videos, algorithms and more.

As a trigger of mass complaint, Facebook has become my generation’s television licence – the focal point for relentless resentment, the favoured terrain for the self-righteous. The fact that a lot of complaining about Facebook takes place on Facebook has always had a dash of irony about it, particularly for those of us who still quite enjoy the platform and do not smash our fists against the screen if it slightly changes the hue of its background colour.

But the soaring frustration raises the question of why anyone thinks one's Facebook account is sacrosanct, and why, when Facebook makes changes to its service, people react as if it is something as fundamental as the very air they breathe that has been polluted.

The tenor of the discussion around Facebook, the general sense of negativity and frustrating, is at odds with the fact that this is a free, non-compulsory service. People complain about Facebook as though it was a service they were forced to use, or were paying over the odds for. Nobody is making you use Facebook and humanity survived for thousands of years without it – so if you are that angry with it, why not just leave?

But is the prospect of life without Facebook even worse than the reality of using a platform that many people seem to hate? Going cold turkey may not prove to be quite as apocalyptic as committed Facebook users think. I have a friend who is not a member of any social networking site and could not be less interested in the world of status updates, likes and tweets. He seems to get by OK.

In fact, he is so old-school he doesn’t even want to keep in touch with friends via email or texts, save for briskly arranging the next face-to-face encounter. Even the gentlest attempts from me to keep him up to date with my news digitally between meet-ups are met with a thundering: "Save it for the pub, mate."

So that's what I do. The result is that our pub meet-ups are always lively and fascinating affairs. We’re both bubbling over with news, regaling each other with fresh anecdotes for hours duing our loquacious, selfie-free evenings.

Increasingly, the very opposite seems to happen when I meet up with a fellow Facebook user. These tend to be lower-energy affairs, during which we greet any news from one another with a passionless: "Yes, I saw your post about it."

Then we look down at our respective iPhones again, to scroll through our news feeds for updates from the lives of other friends.

Men's social lives never used to work this way. Our grandfathers would not have touched Facebook with a bargepole – and not only because it didn't exist in their day. It’s because in the real world, that generation of men were less interested than today’s chaps in gossip, small talk, keeping up with the Joneses, and needy remarks, all of which are the frivolous grist to Facebook’s mill.

Neither would our grandpops be as likely to complain, year after year, about a situation they were quite at liberty to walk away from.

Personally, I still enjoy a lot about Facebook. As a self-employed writer, working from home, the site is like my office water cooler, somewhere to congregate for a bit of energising banter a few times a day.

And if my office managers changed the colour of the water cooler, or used the water cooler for a bit of market research about its consumers, I imagine I would soon get over it, just as I have yet to feel like crying my eyes out over any of the ways Facebook has evolved over the years.

If Mark Zuckerberg ever did something that genuinely cheesed me off, I would simply close my account, walk away and spend a little more time in the real world.

What have any of us got to fear from leaving? Being out of the loop? Good grief – wouldn’t you pay to be out of the loop of a fair amount of what’s on your Facebook feed?

Because let’s be honest: some Facebook posts are as annoying as hell. And no Facebook posts are more annoying than those that complain about Facebook.