Lately I’ve blocked a couple Facebook friends, less because I didn’t them trolling my feed, and more to remove my temptation to troll theirs, regularly fondling their faults, and my resentments (and thus my own faults).
That’s not good for the blood.
The trouble with such a crash detox diet is you suddenly become aware of all the other shit you’re ingesting for bad reasons, and you’re tempted to purge it all!
And so, on a random Saturday morning, you realize you have 1,000 Facebook friends exactly.
And you go about deciding which ones you’d be better off without. Which ones you’d be happier and healthier if you never thought of them again.
• People who post Murphy’s law things about their life. Right when they want to go for a walk, it’s raining. They’re having trouble with the cable company. The prices of things these days!
• People who post political shit that seems ingeniously calibrated to do zero good and total harm, making most of their friends’ eyes glaze over, and make everyone else see red.
• People who cry out in surprised anguish when a 97-year-old actress dies. (Or, a 74-year-old rock musician.) As a 90-year-old Studs Terkel once said at such a moment, “What do you want me to tell ya, Kid? Old people die. That’s what they do!”
• Rich people who post lots of pictures about fabulous three-day weekends that some of their Facebook friends would need a decade of savings to afford. (And, who whine about travel difficulties they had on these weekends.)
• Imbeciles, who re-post random dumb shit they ran across because they never read the book whose title is so good you don’t need the book itself: Amusing Ourselves to Death.
And you know you should eliminate all these people from your feed.
But if you did, you know what would happen: More relative whiners, social marplots, narcissists and morons would pop up, necessitating another purge. And another. And another. Until one day you’d go on Facebook, and the biggest jerk would be you.
And here you’d be, all alone, and cooking your dinner on a hot plate.
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