Today Is The 10th Anniversary of National Unfriend Day

Keeping up with your friends on social media is great. Until it isn't. Then you're forced to take a long hard look at some of the people on your friend list and wonder, "How do I even know this person?"

Sometimes it's good to step back, take a look at your list of contacts and do a bit of housekeeping. Face it, we've been collecting 'friends' for over 15 years.

As hard as it is to remember those peaceful, ordinary, pre-pandemic days, it's even harder to remember what life was like before Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and the new kid on the block, Parler. In truth, our addiction to social media hasn't been around all that long. Facebook came along in 2004, Twitter and TikTok both showed up in 2006, and Instagram has only been on our phones since 2010. Parler has been making a big impact for some people lately and that app didn't exist until 2018.

Over that span of years, as wireless networks got faster and phones became more powerful we've been steadily adding contacts and friends to our social media empire. But how many of those people do we really know? We all get those friend requests from vague accounts with just a profile photo and no other information. If we're smart we just delete those on the spot. But we've got countless 'friends' that we met at an event and thought we'd like to keep in contact with, or just accepted their friend request because you already had 143 friends in common.

Back in 2010 late night TV host Jimmy Kimmel had had enough and declared November 17th to be what he dubbed, National Unfriend Day.

That makes today the 10th anniversary and the perfect time to take care of a little bit of social media housekeeping.

The National Unfriend Day page on NationalToday.com has some tips. First, think about what matters to you and refine your friend list accordingly.

Second, connect with your friends in real life. OK, that's a little bit tricky in the midst of a world-wide pandemic, but maybe use your phone as a phone and actually call someone instead of just hitting "Like" on their latest post.

Third, make sure that your important business contacts are connected to you on LinkedIn as well as your purely social sites. LinkedIn was officially opened to the public in May of 2003 and remains a great business connection asset more than a purely social space.

If you can't bring yourself to actually "Unfriend" someone, you can always "Unfollow" on Facebook. That will allow your news feed to be filled with more posts from the people you actually care about.

Remember, unfriending isn't about being rude, it's about decluttering and refocusing on what's actually important in your life.