Talk about making a change! 23-year-old Rosemary Young has reached new levels of personal freedom with the discovery that she is allowed to unfollow people on Instagram with virtually no consequence.
“I was scrolling through when I saw three posts in a row from this guy who somehow seems to be at Burning Man 365 days a year,” said Young. “I haven’t talked to this person since high school, but I’m constantly looking at pictures of him at festivals and in the woods. That’s when it hit me: I can just unfollow him!”
She clicked the red ‘unfollow’ button with trepidation, and was hit with a wave of relief when nothing bad happened and his posts were just gone from her feed.
“Once I unfollowed WavyBrady789, the floodgates just opened,” said Young. “Suddenly I was unfollowing them all: Girl from my high school with puns in all her captions, ex-coworker who got way too into meal prep, guy I see at parties every few months who’s always promoting his band. All gone!”
The process has taught Young to listen to her heart and block out the content she has no desire to see.
“I am the decider!” said Young. “No more people I don’t care about, no more conspicuous consumption of cool art Instagrams. Who am I trying to impress? Now I follow a choice handful of friends, the best alt meme accounts, a few dogs, and that’s it.”
While Young is feeling at her most liberated and powerful, some haters feel she has taken her mission too far.
“She’s become a little ruthless,” said a friend, Eliana Watson. “I asked her if she was going to our friend’s birthday party, and she was like, ‘No, I unfollow her.’ It’s really started to seep into her real life.”
However, Young feels she’s only better off for her new lifestyle.
“At first I just felt unencumbered by social media niceties, but now I realize this is bigger than that,” said Young. “I started unfollowing my cousins I have nothing in common with and then I was like, wow, family really is just a social construction. I think I’m more of a lone wolf.”
We love this for you, girl!
“I think I need to tell her about the ‘mute’ function,” said Watson.
