Re:Why obsessively following successful people online is dan...
by vmception on Monday October 04, 2021 @06:31PM
(#28753045)
I mute people's posts and stories when their content is primarily rants, resharing some kind of social justice issue, resharing meme accounts, their children. So yeah I probably would not entertain a depressing couple’s spiral for more than a few 15 second clips. They know that too.
I’m only interested in the outgoing and interesting things, inspiration about locations or events, things that could include me. When these things really seem like they will never happen I typically remove them as followers and unfollow them. (Its much easier to curate your social graph as you go, instead of waking up one day and finding it too hard to fix your feed by attempting to unfollow lots of people)
I like to know people personally and I do that in person or over direct message
I only use the story for entertainment personally
Like someone else mentioned, I don't find many people’s online persona that interesting, and I have abruptly deactivated and/or deleted my own profiles before. Periodic curating has been good for me.
It's almost easier to appear happy online when you know you're not; you don't want people to try and offer you unsolicited advice about how "exercise worked for them" or "changing to this particular diet changed my life" or crap like that, so you fake it [1]. You only post things that you think are interesting, you minimize how much you talk about your personal life, and when you do it's only to flex about something cool you did. Whenever I did open up to friends later about my mental health stuff, they were always really surprised to hear it, and that was by design.
[1] To be clear, I'm not knocking diet and exercise. If you're feeling depressed, eating healthier and getting regular exercise is probably the best (and cheapest) place to start, and offers a bunch of other benefits too. My life did improve when I stopped eating Taco Bell ever day.