First of all, thanks to a Google Chrome extension, I was able to remove all my friends with a single click so it’s not as dramatic as it sounds.
What I used to do with my Facebook was to connect with friends and loved ones that I knew. I’d also connect with people whom I felt like would be useful in my career or shared the same interests as I did. So over the years I kept raking them in until I reached the 5000 friend limit.
The problem was, my interests and career kept evolving. So what was relevant then, was annoying and spammy now. Have you ever logged into your social media account and everything you saw just kept annoying you? That was my life. It got to the point where I dreaded logging in.
I had to make a change.
https://giphy.com/gifs/college-gif-friends-facebook-LdnljOZPgqyXu
At first, I’d mute any of my Facebook friends that were littering my timeline but it didn’t make much of a difference.
I decided that I was going to purge my Facebook account. I sat down and went through my Facebook groups first. I left all the groups that were not serving a purpose anymore. I also made sure that members were unable to re-add me back to them either.
From there, I started purging through my Facebook Pages that I had liked over the years. This was the most tedious part of this exercise. There were so many dead dreams amongst those pages. I unliked all of them until only the ones I still have an interest in remained.
https://giphy.com/gifs/computer-typing-nickelodeon-IpeYSEZshTefe
It was time to remove the friends. Originally, I had wanted to go through my friends list one by one but 5 000 was kind of a lot. I went on YouTube to find out how I can remove all my Facebook friends with one click. And as usual YouTube knew exactly how it can be done with various options of how it can be accomplished. I opted for a Google Chrome extension. I installed it. Selected ‘Remove All Friends’ it asked me if I was sure and I was like hell yeah!
45 seconds later, I had 47 friends left on Facebook.
These 47 are people that have deactivated their accounts. I had to manually unfriend them and I was down to zero.
I have since added back most of my friends and the criteria was I had to have met you in real life and we must have shared interests. If any of your posts bring me the slightest discomfort you’ll go from friend to follower real quick.
Preserving your peace starts with the little things, some of them seem trivial but the effects are real.
