Purge

I did a Facebook purge recently. I do this every 1-2 years. You know how it is, you add people as friends on Facebook after having met them once or twice. But you don’t really stay friends, you don’t really keep in touch, and after a while, you forget how this person looks like, how you met them, and you wonder why you’re still Facebook friends with them.

Or it could be an old friend from school whom you no longer meet and no longer have any relationship with. And you wonder why you’re still Facebook friends with them.

Or it could have been someone who you made use of, or someone who made use of you, or someone with whom you mutually made use of each other. At that time, it was convenient, but now you really have nothing to do with each other anymore. And you wonder why you’re still Facebook friends with them.

Well I don’t really have many of these because of my regular purges. I’m not the kind of person that finds joy in accumulating thousands of Facebook friends. If someone wants to keep up to date with what I’m up to lately, they can follow my Facebook account. I don’t necessarily have to be friends with them.

In my latest purge, I removed about 100 Facebook friends, bringing my circle down to about 250. There’s a few Facebook friends that I was unsure if I should keep them around, but I decided to let them stay for now… until the next purge.

It’s like pruning a tree. If you don’t regularly prune it, it can’t grow in the direction you want it to. So I prune. I prune my Facebook friends to keep those that I still value. And so that I can add more value in the weeks to come.