diligently and aggressively culling and decluttering

I've hinted at this before but I tend to hold on to things too long.  Old memories, mementos and friendships.  At my wedding, my best man said in his speech that I was loyal.  I am, to a fault.  Generally I don't discard a friend unless they've dissed me.  

Last summer I did a lot of purging and decluttering.  This year I intend to do some more of the mental and emotional variety.  

trying to heal the hurt and learn to forget the regret

 "Don't look back, let it fade and let it go
Don't look back, let it fade and let it go"

Cutting Crew - Don't Look Back Lyrics | MetroLyrics

There are two big things I need to trim down.  First, I have this big box of letters that I have received from people throughout the years.  Am I or anyone really gonna ever read them to find some peril of wisdom from a friend from a long time ago?  

Second, my FB friends need to get down to a more reasonable level.  I was keeping a lot of them because of loyalty and whatever but fuck if we don't interact anyway what is the point?

For instance, there are a couple of people I use to do speed work with for Marathon Training...in 2005.Or somebody that I met at a friend's party a million years ago.  Do I really need to keep them in my friends list as some sort of message in a bottle to our future alien anthropologist exploring our post-apocolyptic planet?  

Oh he was friends with this attorney who also happened to be friend with someone who would eventually know someone who was there when the revolution began.  

I think not.  Therefore I am diligently and aggressively culling my friends list.  For now, I'm focusing on people who don't really log into their FB account that often and only have an account to keep tabs on their younger relations or perhaps to be tagged in a photo.  Next up is people who don't really interact with me on any level.

It's well established that I have a Love Hate relationship with FB but I'm mostly over it.  I've come to terms that I enjoy connecting with friends in a Virtual Reality Environment.  That's why I was an early adopter of email and loved IM when people used it. For instance the other day I posted:

It's as if after watching the ‪#‎RNC‬ someone said it would be impossible to out crazy that and the ‪#‎DNC‬ said "hold my beer and watch this"

And I got tons of positive reactions from both sides of the aisle.

That said, I finally did it.  I un-friended a trio of people I should have unfriended a long time ago.  We don't interact in real life on on the Zuckerberg Virtual Reality page and there is no love lost between us.

We don't even pretend to like each other on our respective birthdays.  And they certainly never really had my back. 


I need to remove more friends but I'm really hesitant for some reason.  For years I kept some of these people around because I wanted to show that I was friends with them.  Or they were part of a collection, like everyone from book club.  There really is no point.

For instance, I started at the No-Name Software Company with three other friends.  Over the years we stopped trying to maintain lost contact.

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Cuts both ways: The other day someone from the ChicagoNow ecosystem unfriended me.  I wasn't surprised since we haven't interacted in years -- well I like and comment on her post but not the other way around, her being much more popular and pseudo-celebrity.  It did strike me that we have almost 40 friends in common and I'm sure she doesn't interact with most of them any more than she did with me.  So what made her pick me?