Unfollowing Liberals, and Other Things I Can't Believe I Had to Do This Year

It seems like people are always lacking in self-awareness until they become aware that you've distanced yourself from them.

As part of my "I will hide everyone I know, but avoid blocking whenever possible" I recently unfollowed a very liberal friend, and within a day, he was messaging me asking if I had unfollowed him, because I didn't comment on a post he thought I would like.

Of course he posts something about "Murder, She Wrote" the day after I follow him, thereby giving me away. Damn me and my love of Dame Lansbury.

I decided to be honest (never a good idea) and own up to unfollowing him.

He was very confused. Mainly because lately it seems like you only block people if they disagree with you politically and/or refuse to acknowledge that Succession is MOCKING awful, rich white people not CELEBRATING them.

I tell him that while, yes, I do agree with him, I find his posting to be...excessive.

And yes, this is coming from a man who posted over three hundred times in one night, but it was the 2018 Oscars, so please, show yourself to the door. I will not be apologizing at this time.

As much as I hate to use the language of the right to criticize someone on the left, T**** derangement syndrome is very, very real. Some of my liberal friends are letting that dime store scarecrow live in their house rent free while screwing their spouse and peeing in their kitchen sink.

There's a hesitation to say anything about it, because, yes, staying up on the facts does make you a responsible citizen, but...Who exactly are these people posting for?

People like me that they're friends with and who agree with them? For what purpose? To raise my blood pressure? Mission accomplished.

I let the person I unfollowed know that I get my news from, you know, the news, so I don't rely on Facebook for that. (If anything, I rely on Twitter, which is twice as bad, but WAY faster.)

Seeing a select group of my friends slowly become addicted to anger isn't simply irritating, it's actually heartbreaking. This might sound like a radical take, but I truly feel that anger is the root of all addiction, and that it's the hardest addiction to break away from, and I'm basing that on hours of watching Lewis Black stand-up.

I just couldn't keep absorbing the anger of my friends, almost all of whom are people whose anger seems, if not performative, just not useful. I am not talking about my friends who have actually been disenfranchised. I'm talking about Susan from Newport who posts a different liberal rant from her beach house while writing in all caps WHAT IS WRONG WITH THESE PEOPLE?

Susan, I don't know, but can we cool it with the all caps? We're all on the same side here.

And by "the same side" I mean the echo chamber most, if not all of us, have now created on our social media platforms. Whatever you may think of that, I think we can all agree that we have now reached the "preaching to the choir" part of the Matrix take-over, and it's time to start using the criteria I adopted a long time ago when I was trying to figure out whether to post something.

Is it informational or is it insightful?

Now, most of us agree that none of us, unless we're journalists, should be a source for information. And the problem with insight is that it's like a sense of humor, many people think they have it and virtually nobody does.

But it doesn't appear most people are even striving for insight when they post "I CAN'T STAND THE PRESIDENT I HOPE HIS PORK CHOPS ARE OVERCOOKED FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE."

(We're running out of curses. Even the Sicilians are scraping the bottom of the barrel.)

As I've said before, it's fine to blame Facebook for being a cesspool, but we added an awful lot of the cess. When you have algorithms that reward stories and keywords based on how many people are posting about them, it's easy to see how posting about someone, even negatively, directly benefits them.

More than that, it's just not worth living with the anger unless you're going to put that anger to good use, and there is no good use for it on social media if it isn't followed up with real world action.

As for the guy I unfollowed, he got mad and blocked me.

I'd like to say I was upset, but...

My Newsfeed has been a lot quieter.

And now there's one less echo in his chamber.