Mary commented on yesterday's post, saying that her Facebook experience is pretty different from mine. I think my Facebook problems are largely of my own making. Back in the days when Facebook was fun, I accepted all kinds of friend requests from all kinds of people. I do want to know how my high school friend's cancer treatment is going, but I do not want to see the anti-immigrant fact-free memes she also posts. I went to high school in a county where 75% of the 2020 vote went to Trump, and that is reflected in the Facebook posts of my friends from that part of the country. It means that part of seeing other people's cute kid/grandkid pictures these days is seeing some amount of nonsense in the comments about whether it's good or bad that they are or are not wearing masks. I do think it's good for me to get out of my bubble, but at the same time I do not love my glimpses of other people's bubbles.
Also, true confession: I have a bad habit. It's like when you have a raw spot in your mouth and you keep touching it with your tongue to see if it's still sore. I sometimes click through to profiles I have hidden because I want to know if they're still doing the stuff that caused me to hide them. This is dumb, objectively dumb, and yet I do it anyway. It is partially driven by hope, partially driven by sorrow, and partially driven by less reasonable impulses.
Sometimes I think about purging my friends list in a major way, but it feels like such a messy unwieldy task because I genuinely like some of the people who seem to have gone off the deep end. Sometimes it's easier just to pull the plug.
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