Unfollow Ruthlessly

Episode 86: Unfollow Ruthlessly Welcome back to Get Deaddicted. Today's practice applies to anyone who, despite the earlier episodes, is still using social media in some form. If you have already deleted all the apps, this episode is a bonus. If you are still on these platforms, listen carefully. We are going to talk about ruthless unfollowing. Here is the principle. Whatever you are subscribed to is what you become. The accounts you follow form the daily nutritional content of your mind. If you follow two hundred accounts that make you feel inadequate, anxious, envious, angry, or empty, then inadequacy, anxiety, envy, anger, and emptiness are what your mind is being fed every day, for hours, year after year. The platforms have made it shockingly easy to subscribe to mental food that hurts you. Today we take the menu back. The practice is simple. Go through every account you follow on every platform you still use. Every single one. Look at the most recent post. Ask one question. Does this account, on balance, make my life better or worse? Better is rare. Worse is common. Most accounts fall into one of a few categories. The first category is accounts that trigger comparison. Influencers, celebrities, people whose entire life appears to be more beautiful, more successful, more loved, and more curated than yours. These accounts are almost never good for you. Unfollow. The second category is accounts that trigger outrage. Political accounts that exist to make you angry. News accounts that pump alarming headlines into your feed all day. Drama accounts that thrive on conflict. These accounts hijack your nervous system for the platform's benefit, and they leave you depleted. Unfollow. The third category is accounts that produce envy. Lifestyle accounts. Travel accounts. Wealth accounts. Bodies that look impossible. Houses that look impossible. Vacations that look impossible. Even when the content is technically harmless, the cumulative effect of hours of exposure is corrosive to your relationship with your own life. Unfollow. The fourth category is accounts that exist to sell to you. Sponsored content. Affiliate marketers. Brands you do not particularly care about that you somehow followed years ago. Every post is an advertisement. These accounts are not your friends. They are paid persuasion in your feed. Unfollow. The fifth category is people you knew once and have not spoken to in years. The acquaintance from college. The old coworker. The friend of a friend. Their lives are not really your business, and their feeds are quietly making you feel like you should be doing something different with yours. Unfollow. If you ever genuinely reconnect with them in real life, you can re-follow then. -- 51 of 85 -- The sixth category is the parasocial relationship. The creator you watch every day who you feel like you know but who does not know you exist. Streamers, podcasters, vloggers, micro-celebrities. There can be a place for one or two of these in your life if their content is genuinely good for you. There is almost never a place for ten or twenty. Be brutal. Unfollow most. What is left, after this process, is a much smaller list. Real friends you actually talk to. Family. A few accounts that genuinely add value to your life — a great chef whose recipes you cook, a writer whose work you love, an organization you support. Maybe twenty accounts total, often fewer. The feed becomes navigable in minutes rather than hours. The content is mostly good for you. The platform becomes vaguely useful again rather than entirely toxic. You will worry that you are being mean. You are not. They will not notice. Almost nobody pays attention to their follower count at the individual level. Unfollowing is not a relational act. It is a dietary one. You are choosing what enters your mind. You will worry that you will miss out on something. You will miss almost nothing of real value. The news that actually matters reaches you in many ways. The friend who is having a baby will tell you in a text. The actor whose movie you wanted to see will be on the cover of magazines and discussed in conversation. The platforms have trained you to feel like you must follow everything to know what is happening. It is not true. You will worry that the feed will be empty. The feed should be empty more often. An empty feed is a sign of a curated life. A full feed is a sign of being a passive recipient of whatever the algorithm has decided to feed you. There is one more layer to this practice. Mute as ruthlessly as you unfollow. On most platforms, you can keep someone as a connection while muting their content, so they do not appear in your feed but you can still see their posts if you visit their profile directly. Use this freely with people you do not want to socially unfollow — family members whose politics drain you, friends whose lives stress you out — but whose content you do not need to see daily. Mute is the kinder version of unfollow. When you are done, the feeds you still use are quieter, slower, and more nourishing. The minutes you spend on them feel different. The ratio of useful to harmful content has shifted dramatically. For some people, this practice alone reduces their social media use by half, because the feed is no longer constantly producing the emotional pull that drove the compulsive scrolling in the first place. Without the pull, you scroll less. This is episode eighty-six. Curate the menu. Choose your inputs. Unfollow without mercy. Tomorrow we batch our messages. -- 52 of 85 --