Hear ye, hear ye! I announce this the official start of spring (cleaning)! No more bleak bomb cyclones full of wind and snow. Onward to warm, sunny days filled with endless mimosas and French fries. It’s a time for renewal and fresh starts. It’s a time to throw away your unwanted things and feel lighter as you head into the warmer months.
https://www.instagram.com/p/Buwf1yOj3kP/
That’s why, for most people, this is the time of year that everyone feels motivated to Marie Kondo (yes, it’s a verb) everything in their homes. From getting rid of the 10 sweaters you didn’t wear the entire winter, to finally throwing away that expired bottle of tahini you bought to be the healthier you. Note to my fans: just buy the Zahav hummus at Dizengoff instead of trying to make it at home. It’s so much easier!
But why should we limit the spring purging to just the physical things we own? It’s 2019, y’all! Let’s expand our spring cleaning to the place where we spend most of our time: Instagram.
Hit the road, Jack
Also known as the curse of the public profile. Sure, I keep my profile public (@smt210) so that I can gain more followers, but the caveat is that I get a lot of randos following me in their attempt to get followed back. Spring is the time to clean up all those spam accounts who you don’t know and who you don’t necessarily want to be following your every move on IG.
This is where one of Instagram’s best features comes in: Just go to your profile and click on your followers. Once the list comes up, you’ll see three little dots to the right of everyone’s name. Tap those and you’ll be prompted with this:
Click “Remove” and you’ll be on your way to purging the people you don’t want following you anymore. The BEST part about this is that everyone that you unfollow doesn’t get a notification telling them they’ve been removed. So, you can play dumb when you remove your mother or Aunt Joanne from seeing every single thing you post.
Mute ‘em and lose ‘em
We all have those friends who post WAY too often and whose content is questionably boring at best. One more quick spring clean-up task is to mute your friends’ stories/posts. This is a lifesaver from wanting to end friendships with the people who still don’t understand what good content is in 2019.
Simply go to their profile the next time they show up on your story, then tap the three little dots at the top right corner of their profile. Click “Mute” and you’ll be prompted with the following:
From there you can mute their posts (who cares about posts anymore, tbqh), their stories (this is where the gold is), or both! This feature allows you to still follow this person, but not see their stories or posts unless you actively go look for them yourself. It’s the digital version of putting baby in the corner. Again, the best part is that the people you follow don’t know that you’ve muted them, and for that, we can all be thankful.
Goodbye my someone, goodbye my love…
Finally, the most permanent of all spring cleaning actions: the unfollow. This is the most drastic version of digital spring cleaning, but this one is sometimes necessary. Do we really need to see 100 profiles of thirst traps prancing around basically nude? Yes. Is it good for our psyche? Yes. So, keep those sex-beasts around and just go unfollow the “friends” from college who you had freshman seminar with, and say, “thank u, next,” as you replace them with 25 new thirst trap accounts. Because life is too short. Do what preserves your happiness.
Happy cleaning, folx!
