why does that unfollow bother me so much?

mixed feelings’ multi-voiced advice column features a mental health expert or writer who responds to your most pressing existential conundrums. Use our anonymous form to be considered for a future newsletter. This week, writer Casey Lewis answers: "to follow or unfollow?”

hey mixed feelings,

To follow or unfollow? That is the question! I recently had an acquaintance use both their business account and personal account to unfollow me! Ouch! But I’ve yet to ceremoniously unfollow them because I’m worried that such reaction could be seen as petty? I can understand the unfollow if say I’m an excessive poster (but I’m not). I can understand if I constantly express political or social opinions that may differ from theirs (I don’t really use IG for those purposes). I can even understand if whatever I post just doesn’t interest them (Sure, that’s fair! But why follow back in the first place...). But I can’t help but not feel sensitive about this, given that this person wasn’t a total stranger to me!

I thought this acquaintance was pretty cool and admirable! I saw her following me back as confirmation of the same gesture back. Now with the unfollow…. I feel uncool…I feel like even if people feel disinterested in friends or profiles, we tend to just mute or disengage…no?…The gesture of an unfollow feels impactful. It sucks that I’ve put so much thought into this…probably a child wound of wanting to feel accepted. I’m worried about what it’s going to be like to see the unfollower in person. It’s obvious now that they don’t think I even fit in with their world. Does returning an unfollow send a message of pettiness? Or would it be more impactful to not do anything... continue to follow them and look like a hapless admirer? — Sincerely, Don’t ever download those follow/unfollow counter apps!

Casey Lewis is a writer and creator of After School, a newsletter dedicated youth culture and trends. She was formerly an editor at Teen Vogue, MTV, and New York Magazine. She's been obsessed with youth culture as long as she can remember.

dear DEDTFUCA, 

If you spend any amount of time online (and based on your very online question, I know you do), you’ve seen all of the headlines about Jonathan Haidt’s latest bestseller, The Anxious Generation, a book that more or less blames teen anxiety on smartphones. Whether you agree with Haidt’s thesis or not, there’s no denying that smartphones — particularly the social media apps on our smartphones — have a significant impact on our lives, and rarely is the impact a good one.

Before smartphones, you would not give much thought to the kind of casual acquaintances you’re talking about here. You wouldn’t see their summer vacations or their anniversary dinners or their birthday parties, and you wouldn’t waste a second of time wondering if they ever thought about you, because, frankly, you’d never think about them.

Social media has given us the opportunity (or curse, depending on your POV) to track who deigns to grant us the validation of a follow. But when it comes to following (and, similarly, unfollowing) someone on social media, it’s often…not that deep. I reached out to my friend Rachel Christensen, who worked for years as a social media executive before becoming a psychotherapist, to get her expertise on this. Rachel also, notably, started her career at gURL.com, an early-aughts advice website for teen girls, which means she’s been dispensing wisdom to young women on the internet for decades. She understands the impulse to be chronically online and she also understands concepts like “attachment theory” and “shadow work” (not to mention “psychobabble”).

Many of us are compelled to assign too much meaning to other’s actions, Rachel explains, and that seems to be the case here. “What I'm really curious about is why an acquaintance unfollowing is so impactful and personal,” she says. “The word ‘narcissism’ is really scary, and capital-N narcissism is not what we're talking about here, but when someone's actions feel like there must be a lot of purpose, and the purpose must include me in the center of it, it’s usually a deflated narcissism.” I was not familiar with this term, because I am not a psychotherapist, but some further research revealed to me that deflated narcissism is a “state of psychic helplessness that can occur when a narcissist's sense of entitlement is challenged or their fragile self-esteem is damaged.” If an acquaintance unfollowing not one but two of your social media accounts doesn’t feel like a challenge to one’s fragile self-esteem, I don’t know what does. “Something that I would want to dig into and understand,” Rachel adds, “is why are you making the meaning that you're making?” 

It is human to wonder what compelled someone to unfollow you, but it is unproductive to spend too much of your brain’s capacity searching for answers because, as Rachel says, what led to the unfollow could be literally anything.

I do not use unfollow apps — though many, many people do, so you should not feel shame about it — but during the reporting of this piece, I happened to notice that a professional acquaintance who I respect quite a bit and think is very cool unfollowed me on both Instagram and Twitter. It sent me into a spiral. What did I do wrong? Did I say something offensive or, worse, unfunny? Am I posting too much? Not enough? Did she ever even follow me? Is life a figment of my imagination? 

I noticed that she was no longer following me just before bed, and I woke up thinking about it, and then proceeded to spend most of the day thinking about it. The time spent thinking about it made me feel even worse than how I felt when I first discovered that she wasn’t following me. The mere fact that I couldn’t stop thinking about it made me feel ashamed that…I couldn’t stop thinking about it.

Everyone’s relationship to social media is so fraught these days, which I understand acutely not just because I had the exact same experience as you, DEDTFUCA, but also because I report on young people’s relationship to social media quite a bit.

As Rachel told me — and as you assuredly know deep down — an unfollow could be for any number of reasons: Maybe because you’re so beautiful and successful that you trigger negative feelings inside of her, therefore she unfollowed for her own mental health. Maybe she’s developed a crush on you Love Actually-style, and she unfollowed you out of self preservation reasons. Maybe she’s obsessive about her follower-to-following ratio. Maybe she decided to only follow her best friends!

explore why you’re feeling the way you feel

Social media gives us validation, and that’s why we spend so much time scrolling on it: validation feels really good! An acquaintance unfollowing can feel like they’re invalidating you. “That's the problem when you use other people's mirrors to look at yourself,” Rachel says. “If you're looking for validation from other people, you're never going to be enough. And it's always going to lead to feeling like shit.”

Sit in your feelings, Rachel advises, and don’t judge yourself too harshly. “Feelings are pieces of information,” she says. “That's it. They are not good. They are not bad. They are not evil. They are not dark. They are just information.” Rachel has been my friend for 15 years and this is maybe the most profound thing she’s ever said, and she’s said a lot of profound things.

As for those unfollow apps, Rachel says: “Immediately stop.” Delete them right this second — no, really, we’ll wait. “But stay really curious about why it is hard to stop and what stories you're telling yourself,” she adds.

give yourself some limits 

As you might expect from a social media executive turned psychotherapist, Rachel thinks social media is generally bad. “You're more valuable than your fucking social media,” she says. But she understands that not everyone can or will quit cold turkey.

“It's just really titillating and exciting, like 24/7 news. We don't need it. Our brains can’t handle it. Everything is optimized to keep you on and to keep you watching and to keep you engaging so that they can sell that shit to advertisers.” 

Still, she recommends limits — and distance. “It's kind of like porn,” she says. “If you watch porn, and you're like, ‘This is how people are having sex. Oh, my God, this is how I should be having sex. What's wrong with me?’ You should not look at porn. But if you could look at it and be like, ‘This is fantasy. I'm getting something from it.’ Cool. That's social media.”

to follow or unfollow 

While there’s no question that you should delete the unfollow apps, whether you should unfollow your acquaintance depends on how you feel. Rachel says to do whatever helps you sleep best at night. “Maybe for her that's unfollowing and washing her hands of it so she's not triggered by it, or maybe it's [to continue] following so that she doesn't look petty,” as this is “a distress-tolerance issue,” she adds, meaning the ability to manage emotional distress — whether real or imagined — without making it worse. 

As for me, I thought hard about unfollowing my acquaintance, but ultimately decided to do absolutely nothing. She is one of many acquaintances in my life. These are people who aren’t my friends and aren’t my family and ultimately, don’t mean a lot to me. If I were to run into her on the street and have a convivial conversation with her, I like knowing that we’ll part ways and I won’t have unceremoniously unfollowed her for an arbitrary reason — and knowing that she’ll have to sit with whatever baggage (big or small) led her to unfollow me.