I tried, and ended up losing contact with pretty much all of my family. Facebook is so deeply integrated with their daily lives that they consider e-mails, phone calls and SMS'es to be an unneccesary hassle.

After a while I had to get a new Facebook account, because people kept messaging my wife over messenger, asking her to forward the messages to me.

This. When you try to tell people this, especially here on HN, they say "well, people should just change to suit you or they're not worth contacting". The arrogance of the technically minded can be astounding; it took ten years to get our acquaintances on Facebook, they're not going to change just because we say so.

Sure, you won’t get passively invited to things, but if you regularly are keeping in touch with people they will invite you to things anyway.

That's the problem: pretty much everyone I know -- including my mother, who started claiming I was hard to get hold of when I asked her to call instead of messaging my wife on Facebook -- stopped keeping in touch. Most people I know simply don't want to talk over the phone, send SMS'es, or use emails ("email is for signing up to various services and resetting passwords").

how to become a social recluse 101: miss a couple of these facebook events, start getting known as an awkward anti-social person because you went to someone's launch event but not to their birthday party(coz bday invites only go out on facebook,no email or other discussion except maybe a text asking you where you are day of,hour of when you can't re-schedule another commitment)

Congrats, now you don't get invited to any of that person's events. Repeat until you only goto close friends events(who also start excluding you from invites because of accidental snubs)

With 'friends' like that, being a recluse sounds like a far better option. They sound like the kind of people who would think they are going to these events to 'network'.

Sounds like some pretty vapid people you’re referring to. Any social connections worth having are to people intelligent enough to understand that not everyone lives on Facebook.

Your friends don't sound like very nice people