In the last week, a celebrity came out as transgender, the US supreme court heard oral arguments in a case that might legalize same-sex marriage in every state and the city of Baltimore bore witness to impassioned, sometimes violent reactions to ongoing police brutality.
In other words, it’s been a wonderful opportunity to find out that your nearest and dearest on Facebook are transphobic, homophobic, racist or all three.
We tend to react to these horrifying realizations by avoiding Facebook, and sometimes by complaining on Twitter on the theory that there are fewer racist great-uncles there. (Plenty of racists; just fewer great-uncles.) But what if we could just clean up our Facebook feeds so that they did us less emotional violence? What if we could just ... tidy up?
As you’d know if you could stand to look at Facebook right now, basically everyone is currently tackling their closets, desks and dressers via the KonMari method, detailed by Marie Kondo in her book The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up. Most famously, Kondo asks you to look at all your possessions and ask, “Does this give me joy?” If not, out it goes.
You can apply similar thinking to your Facebook feed. (Twitter and blog comments can be made to take care of themselves to a certain degree – I use Block Together and Shut Up – but to get some Facebook breathing room, you’ll have to KonMari it on your own.) You don’t have to surround yourself with clutter just because you own it, and you don’t need to maintain a Facebook account that you can’t bear to look at just because, at some point, you friended some turds.
When it comes to the internet, though, “joy” isn’t the right rubric. This is especially true during sad and serious events; the most necessary things to hear often bring the least happiness. You will not, for example, feel joy reading grave anger about Baltimore from Ta-Nehisi Coates or weariness from Pilot Viruet, but you should read them anyway.
Instead, I recommend paring down your feed according to two questions: “Is this doing me harm?” and “Is this somebody whose voice I need to hear?” It’s a balance – sometimes the answers are “kind of” and “kind of” respectively, and you have to figure out which is more important. Sometimes a person is doing you no active harm, but no favors, and their sheer unnnecessariness outweighs all. (Have you even seen these people since kindergarten? Do they have any stake whatsoever in the matter at hand, or are they just running their mouths?) But if you can truly determine that someone’s posts are harming you unnecessarily, then please, unfriend without guilt.
“Do I need to hear this?” is not the same as “Do I want to hear this?”. I don’t really want to hear my black friends (and strangers) talk about the failures of white allies like me, but I need to. I don’t want to hear details of the daily harassment my trans friends face, but it’s important that I listen if they’re telling me. And I don’t want to hear from people with whom I strongly disagree, but sometimes that’s important too. Sometimes things are no fun, but still good for you, and need to be taken like bitter medicine.
Only you can determine where an individual friend or post falls. Like “does this bring me joy,” the answers to these questions will be fairly individual. While it’s a good bet you don’t need to hear the hot takes of an acquaintance from elementary school, the question of whether you need to know that your cousin calls rioters “thugs” probably depends on your preexisting psychological well-being and family structure. Allies – people who aren’t members of a disadvantaged group, but support and respect that group’s rights – have a responsibility to respond to a certain amount of bullshit from their similarly-privileged peers, and that means not running away. Some people are generally less harmed by ugliness than others, because they have thicker skins or more practice or an adaptive, enviable streak of benevolent sociopathy. And you may need to hear someone’s opinion more when they are personally affected by an issue, even if you barely remember who they are.
But, as with determining joy, your assessment of harm and need should be yours alone. People’s right to speak does not create an obligation on your part to hear – or to let them clutter your feed or your brain with garbage. You should be able to make yourself a liveable Facebook, the way you should be able to make a closeable underwear drawer.
