Facebook is the necessary evil of our times. There is not anyone you will meet that is not on Facebook. If you do meet someone that says they are not on Facebook they are either lying, don’t want to “friend” you or didn’t comprehend the question. I have a Facebook account for business purposes only. I left the private side of Facebook a long time ago. Ninety percent of the people on Facebook are not my friends. Heck, some of them I have not seen or talked to in over 20 years. For some reason I found these people having a negative effect on the way I lived my life. I felt a need to keep up with these people’s lives. All the meaningless rants and pictures of events that seem tailor-made to literally just take pictures were daunting on my time.

Once I stopped going on Facebook my time freed up right away. I didn’t spend 20-30 minutes scrolling down my feed. That would be fine theoretically. However so many of the wonderful people we have vaguely fond memories of are actually annoy the sh*t out of us. The annoyance and sometimes anger is a pretty frequent feeling directed to people you may never meet. Whats worse is when it is family who does not align with your understanding of values albeit race, politics, money. Every big current event that happens leaves you more incredibly flabbergasted that aunt Anne or cousin Issac would be such an [insert negative word here].

Rather than being that person who goes around being unsocial by un-friending someone; I just locked down my account and stopped using it. Now Facebook has a third option. You can now stay friends with someone but mute all of their posts in your News Feed. The new Facebook feature that basically lets you  “snooze” friends, groups or pages for 30 days by clicking the drop-down menu on a post. On the other spectrum of the snoozing is filtering. You can now also filter through your friends or specific pages and show those updates at the top of your feed. These are features that should have been part of Facebook from the start. However, I do think these are enough to give Facebook another try.