Creating a Happier Insta-Experience

(The power of muting)

I was on the phone with a good friend of mine about six months ago. I said, “I have been noticing that you’re not on social media much anymore. I miss seeing you and your photos!”

My friend said, “I just don’t like being on it, really. It’s so negative,” and then went into specific reasons — reasons that didn’t surprise me one bit. Then, my friend told me that, in order to make Instagram a better place for occasional check-ins, they spent a few hours muting posts and stories by a huge number of people.

“That way,” my friend said, “I’m not actually unfollowing anybody, so they keep their numbers, and I can go directly to their grid and check in any time…but I’m only regularly seeing exactly who I care the most about.”

I thought this was a great idea, and I decided to work towards that goal.

Here’s something I haven’t done before: I am getting ready to give you, in great detail, my method of whittling down the number of accounts I follow on Instagram. If you don’t really care (Wow, that’s rude.) (KIDDING!), you can simply scroll until you see the color photo. Start reading again right after that.

First, I had to consider the accounts I follow.

They include so many people from my blogging (and blogging conference) days. The people in that group fall into a few categories:

1. People who connected with me (or I with them) online because we have mutual friends, but we’ve never met in person and really don’t interact online either

2. People I have only met in person briefly and with whom I had one or two very short personal interactions

   1. Some of these are people with whom I chat occasionally via messaging and post interactions

   2. Some of them connected with me (or I with them) after that quick in-person meet-up, and that connect request acceptance was the only and last interaction we’ve had online

3. People with whom I have spent some in-person time and also stay in touch with via messaging and interacting on each other’s posts

4. People who I consider to be “active friends.”

I also follow a lot of celebrities, local businesses, and political accounts, from reputable news sources to reputable content creators to politicians themselves. And naturally, I follow my sister, my adult sons and their spouses, and other family members.

Thinking about the accounts I follow and how they fit into these categories made it easier for me to decide who to mute. My strategy was not to sit with it and do all of my muting in one sitting like my friend did; rather, I thought about the categories above and, as I scroll through the platform each time, I’ll mute a little bit here and there.

I’m also not muting nearly as many accounts as my friend did. Mainly the ones I don’t really care to see in my feed are the people who I’m connected with strictly because of mutual friends. It’s nothing personal: I don’t even know them personally! So…mute.

From the second category, I am muting the people with whom I don’t ever interact online. An in-person interaction or two doesn’t really go far if you ghosted each other after hitting “follow.” So…mute.

The other group of people in the second category are the ones with whom I’ve had online interactions. I want to continue to give those relationships a chance to bloom and thrive. So…not muting.

Categories three and four are no-brainers…not muting.

Celebrities are a tough one for me. None of them are following me for some reason (WINK), so if I find that I’m following one who has become less interesting to me over time, I just unfollow them. I have continued to follow most of them though, because I like to keep up with that sort of thing as a #PopCultureEnthusiast. (Are the kids still hashtagging phrases within written articles?) Not muting and mostly not unfollowing.

I follow a ridiculous number of businesses that are local to Chicago (my hometown) and Knoxville (my current town, also sort of homey). Keeping up with what’s happening in Chicago makes me feel more connected to a city I miss deeply. Knoxville, being the size of a large Chicago suburb, has a lot going on with its Makers scene, Foodie scene, Market scene, (all three amazing) and more. Because I like to keep up with local news, events, and other miscellanea, not muting.

The politically-related accounts I follow are excessive mainly because this category runs the gamut from local candidates and organizations to national ones. It’s my civic responsibility to keep up with what’s going on in this dumpster fire of a timeline we’re currently inhabiting, and I feel like I’m giving myself a fairly well-rounded summary of the madness — and more importantly, the hope that truly does exist — each time I check in. So, not muting.

Finally, it goes without saying that I will follow my family members indefinitely. Not muting.

…and sometimes your bliss can come from who you’re following (or not following).

TL:DR: (Welcome back, if you skipped that part above!) I am consistently working on reevaluating who I am following on social media similar to how I consistently reevaluate what I keep in my closets and drawers, and thinning out when I can. I’m not disposing of what truly matters to me in either case. The less impact or meaning something has in my life, the more I can feel good about not expending time or energy on it (or them). While my process on this social media clean up hasn’t made my feed super tight and tidy, I can tell a difference. That not only gives me a little more room to breathe, but it’s a time-saver when scrolling, too.

And by the way, that friend of mine? We stay in touch via text and the occasional call, and I love taking the time for that.

Do you have a practice that works when it comes to social media accounts you follow? I’d love to know: share in comments!