On "friends" and "following"

I'm constantly in a state of reevaluating what I spend my time on in life, especially when it comes to social media.

Social media came be this big black hole that does you no good. OR it can be this beacon to teach you new things and uplift and inspire you! I'm am constantly trying to corral mine to be the latter of those two.

Thus every few weeks or months it seems like I go through instagram and really thin out the amount of people I follow. It's not that I don't like people and unfollow them because of that, I just think to myself is this really doing me good seeing their constant photos, thoughts and what they're doing? The less people I follow, the less time I'm on my phone, and then the more time I'm with my family.

And then there's Facebook, I find myself pretty often clicking the button on Facebook that says "stay friends but stop seeing their updates". And then I thought to myself, I don't need to stay "friends" with nearly a 1000 people I don't know that well from elementary, high school and college. I went through it one day and went from 915 friends to 415. Again, it's not that I don't like those people but I really don't KNOW you well at all, there's not reason for us to stay "friends." Also I read an article recently about facebook "friends" that you were once friends/acquaintances with but now, 10 years later, you know nothing about their life or their character or their values really. I don't post many things about my family and children on Facebook but if I do, these strangers don't need to know about it. I never "de-friended" people before, but after reading that article about the safety of your kids I didn't care about hurting people's feelings of un-friending.

I do post a lot about my family on this blog but I feel like there's more privacy from a blog since people have to have the exact address and CHOOSE to come back to this specific site to look at my life. Maybe that's untrue, but blogs are not as popular as they once were.

SOOOOO If we are no longer friends on Facebook, I am not a follower of you on instagram, please please please don't be offended. I am just trying to be a better mother to my children, I absolutely promise. If we were friends again in real life and hanging out I would probably be back to following you on social media so I can foster my real time friendships, I feel like REAL  person to person relationships are the most helpful. I know we live in a virtual world now with lots of "online" relationships but I want the majority of mine to be REAL physical contact ones.