Don't Drink The Poison

Again, when I blog, I don’t care to edit hardcore. So this will have mistakes.

Have you ever been scrolling through your Facebook or Twitter feed, or whatever other social outlets you may use, and grit your teeth in anger every time you see certain comments from certain people? It almost completely ruins all the positive stuff you read before or after it, doesn’t it?

I refer to these kinds of people as the poison. Poisoning your news feed one negative word at a time. These people could be of different political minds, religious stances, or even music tastes, whatever. Although there are some people that may have different opinions than you in some of these areas, there are always those couple of people that just never shut the hell up and are so negative…all the time. That’s the poison in your feed.

I used to keep those people around in my feed just because they were friends of mine, or maybe even related to someone I knew. Fear of making a scene by “unfriending” them wasn’t worth the hassle in my mind, so, I’d always keep them around, crazy to think nowadays that excusing someone off your personal social outlet(s) is cause for war.

Anyway, so I’d keep these jokers around, the couple that I had annoying the crap out of me on a daily basis that is, just to “be cool”. This ended up corrupting my feed. I found that after reading their bogus crap would cause me to post more negatively. Their poison was making me sick.

Here’s an example of what I’m talking about. I had this one guy, we’ll call him David, on my feed. This guy was a mess. He was constantly posting negative, delusional crap all the time. His specialty was politics. Now this guy changed his views like he changed his underwear, weekly. One day he’d be for someone, the next day he’d be against them and for someone else. Every time a figure, political or not that he was in favor of, said or did something that he disagreed with, he’d turn on them. Can you imagine being friends with a person like this? No thanks.

This cycle went on for years with this idiot. He would get on Facebook and rant and rave about how everyone from government to cops were out to get us and that you’d better thank him because he “was smarter than everyone else”. Yes…he actually said that…more than once. I thought about dumping his sorry ass a couple of times but he actually took pride in the fact that people would “unfriend” him so I wasn’t going to give him the satisfaction. Call it selfish pride I know. Here was this dude poisoning my feed all the time but yet I’d keep him there because I didn’t want to be the first to give in on the silent war we were having together. Stupid, I know, but I did it anyway.

In the early days with David we’d agree on a lot of things, but as time passed, he got more paranoid and confrontational. It got to the point where I quit posting on his status updates all together and he would only post on mine to be confrontational. The final post he made, on my status of course, was so nasty and rude that I won’t say what he said right here because it was that bad. After that, he dropped me on his friend list. I won! LOL. Know what I did to make this guys so angry? I posted a graph for educational purposes of facts that he didn't agree with. That’s it. This caused him to explode and defriend me.

Well, as soon as he dropped me, my feed was much more cheery. I even looked forward to reading everything again because I didn't dread seeing the lunatic ravings of a madman post as the thread rolled up. It was nice. I mean, up to that point, prior to David’s rant, I did do a little “house cleaning” on my social sites and removed the couple of negative sources out of my feeds. So it was better already, but David leaving was the icing on the cake.

One day my beautiful girlfriend taught me that you can actually block what you see in your feed without unfriending them (I’m not tech savvy, what can I say). Once she showed me this wonderful technique, I blocked the rest of what I deemed could be potential negative sources in the future.

Guess what happened next? All of a sudden, my feed was more positive. My personal negative posts went down to almost none and my positive posts went way up. I felt better every time I logged on and read my social outlets. I was even posting more than I did in the past because, well, I was in good spirits to communicate with people. I was enjoying my social outlets for what they were originally intended for, to get in touch with friends and family, new and old, and share life experiences together.

After all, isn’t that the main purpose of social media? So I say, unfriend, block, hide, or do whatever to those negative David’s you may have. Eventually, everyone else will too. Then they can live their lives like they did before social media, alone and in hate.

Don’t drink the poison.