Drop it like Kondo
I unfollowed someone on twitter last week, because reading their tweets made me feel bad. I remember the moment I noticed the feeling, and thought to myself, “is there any good reason to follow this person at all?” I scrolled through their tweets and noticed three things:
Regularly expressed anger (“raging”)
Arguments with others about the same
Either a partially or completely uninformed position (he hadn’t done his homework before raging)
That was all I could find. There wasn’t anything positive. I couldn’t remember why I had followed him. I think at some point he must have said something witty, or maybe we shared a moment of negativity regarding something I am not happy about, like the various reasons I think the Tokyo olympics is a deleterious to Japan. He’s followed by a few people who I follow, but none of them spew uninformed bile like he does.
So I decided to “Marie Kondo” his twitter account. I clicked unfollow. And I instantly felt better.
“The best way to choose what to keep and what to throw away is to take each item in one’s hand and ask: ‘Does this spark joy?’ If it does, keep it. If not, dispose of it. This is not only the simplest but also the most accurate yardstick by which to judge.”
- Marie Kondo, a.k.a KonMari
I KonMari’d him because I want to increase my overall happiness and reduce stress, as part of a 30-day experiment to get healthier, happier and leaner. All of us have enough stress in our lives right now that we can’t directly control, so I am being mindful about the stress I can control. If it doesn’t spark joy, and I don’t need it for anything else, I’m tossing it.
I don’t agree with many of the articles that try to apply Marie Kondo’s method to social media by restricting connections to friends and not contacts. The beauty of twitter is the virtually limitless reach anyone has to everyone. Recently I have been thinking about how powerful my words are on twitter. Not power measured in fame or following, but powerful in that your tweets - your words - contribute to creating your personal brand. With every tweet, people you’ve never met who come into your sphere of communication begin to build an image of who you are.
This isn’t fundamentally different than before the Internet.
“First impressions matter.”
“Dress for success.”
“How you look, how you speak, how you act, is your personal brand.”
There is one key difference: Twitter and other near-infinitely scalable social media amplifies your personal brand so far beyond what was possible. Right now, I want to make good impressions on people I have never met in Tokyo, Fukuoka, Osaka, Kyoto, Hachioji, Sendai and many, many more places in Japan and around the world. I have decided that I don’t care about the number of followers I have. Instead, I care about how the people following me and others who somehow come across my posts feel about me.
There are so many wonderful things to share every day. Like just last night, I didn’t juice a lemon, I processed a lemon (twitter post coming today and will link it here). It’s so trivial, but I was thrilled to learn why it’s important. There will be things in life that bother me, upset me, and even terrify me, most of which I can’t control. But I believe I owe it to everyone in the digital sphere of communication that I’m a part of to contribute positively by thinking before I react, always gaining enough information, and contributing to a discussions about things that are both happy and not, with positivity, never negativity.
This exercise in mindfulness made me realize just how much bigger this is than my happiness. It’s about the happiness of others all around me, including the many, many people I have come to like who I haven’t met in person yet.
We’re all in the same big hot springs of life, just in different corners.
If anyone ever tells you that it’s impossible to be positive about something negative, that’s the first red flag that the they’re not adding anything to your happiness, and only taking it away.
What do you think? Let me know your thoughts on twitter @japaneur
