Last weekend I was sitting on the couch with my iPad, reading blogs via feedly. I do this all the time, and if there’s a post I want to return to, I always use the “mark as unread” feature to keep it visible. But on Sunday, instead of “unread” I accidentally hit “mark all as read.” And I couldn’t find a way to undo it. The 150ish items in my feed vanished, never to be seen again unless I want to track them down individually.
For an instant, I felt panicked. What about those posts that I hadn’t read yet? What about the ones I wanted to add to Pinterest? What about the ones I wanted to read but kept putting off because I felt like I didn’t want to read it right at that moment? They were all gone. The horror!
I wish I was exaggerating, but I’m not. I literally felt a moment of panic, of having done something harmful.
And then, of course, I realized how ridiculous that was. If I don’t read a post right then, what does that really say? How much do I really care about it if I can’t even take 5 minutes on an otherwise relaxing Sunday afternoon to read it? If I’m putting it off for later…why? When is it going to be “later” anyway?
(Please tell me I’m not the only one who does this…?)
In my life, this is one of the ways FOMO* rears its head. And it’s stupid, and silly, and it’s making me stress over things that I DO NOT need to be stressing over. If I don’t read any of these posts, my life will continue on just fine.
So new rule: don’t kept marking things unread because I intend to come back to them. Either read it then, or let it go. And if the number of unread items in my feed climbs above 100, it’s time to “mark all as read” and start fresh.
And taking it a step farther: I’m going to whittle down my content. If I’m only opening a feedly post so that it gets marked as read, I’m going to immediately delete that blog from my feed. Same with Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram — I’m going to start hiding people, and removing contacts.
My name is Sarah and I can’t keep up with everything.
And that’s ok.
(* FOMO = Fear of Missing Out. Talk about a first world problem.)
June says
I follow a lot of blogs as well, some I should unsubscribe to because i ALWAYS click mark as read. clearly yours isnt one of them :O) And yes sometimes when I get behind on them I just hit the Mark As Read to all of them. NOTHING is that important on them that I can do without. And when I do that, I feel all kinds of fuzzy!!!
katie says
When I go over 300 friends on Facebook I usually go through and unfriend a few people. I generally ask myself – would I ever keep up with this person if not on FB (goodbye random high school or college classmates), do I really know them enough to care what’s going on in their life (goodbye friends of friends I met at a party once and random person I was in a wedding with), and do I really want them to know what’s going on in my personal life (goodbye random co-workers). So far I have never gone back and re-friended people so I figure it’s working ok.
Also the FOMOF(ootball) ads for the NFL are pretty funny if you have not seen them.
Stephanie says
I definitely do this, only with tabs instead of “unread” folders. I try to close my browsers each night, so I don’t wake up to a messy monitor in the morning. Some days, I can’t bring myself to do it. FOMO is real.
MelV says
I have this same fear but not only with the blogs I follow but also my Inbox is overflowing with stuff I am saving for later.