Escaping the Comparison Trap: Step 2

In How to Escape the Comparison Trap, Becka's second step is to...

Step 2. Hide the people you don’t actually know from your Facebook feed. You’re wasting time and brainpower trying to keep up with them all.

Second, I hid a BUNCH of people from my Facebook feed. And by a bunch, I mean hundreds. I did not un-friend them; let’s just clarify that from the start. But I now only keep people in my feed whom I actually know in real life and/or work with. It takes me about 5 minutes to catch up on their lives when I open Facebook (instead of the hour or so it took me to read about every single contact I had). And when I’m curious about a particular person, I just look her/him up.

There is a plethora of social awkwardness created by facebook that I doubt Mark Zuckerberg ever envisioned. One is knowing things about people that you shouldn't know. On more than one occasion I've seen a girl I went to high school with around town. I don't talk to her when we pass by each other. I'm not trying to being rude; we're just not friends. Never have been. Yet I know who she's married to, the names of her kids, and where she went for vacation. Not only do I know all that, I've seen the pictures! Talk about creepy.

I agree with Becka; I don't un-friend often, but as I went through my newsfeed I started to click the unsubscribe button. I was really surprised by how many people I was facebook friends with that I was never friends with in real life. Now I can catch up in ten minutes once a week, and that's probably okay. Who knows someone may even tell me something about their life that I haven't already read on facebook.

If you missed them, here are the first two posts in this series:
Internet Envy
Escaping the Comparison Trap: Step 1