How to, and should you get your phone to stop showing you pictures of your ex-girlfriends and dead homies.

Despite being a smartphone hater who hates having a smartphone and hates everything that the advent of the smartphone has done to society– or more specifically, to me– I do in fact own, use, and occasionally even enjoy a smartphone. More specifically, I use and have used an Android phone for the last 15 years. There are a lot of good reasons to own an Android as opposed to an iPhone: more and cheaper purchasing options, greater customizability, and not having to worry about participating in the group chat of the beer league softball team from three years ago where the other guys benched you all of the time for fear of your clearly superior physical prowess. If I had one complaint about owning an Android, it would be that on a near-daily basis it proudly resurfaces images of my dead homies and ex-girlfriends. 

Hey Mikey, check out this memory from 6 years ago, says my phone to me as I’m boarding the subway. I try to swipe away but for just a moment I'm forced to reconcile with the miniaturized visage of a relationship I kamikazed in the fog of war of my self-doubt. Shots fired across the bow of battleship Mike when a long-dead compatriot reemerges atop the display of my Google Pixel– Memories 🥳, it tells me. 

Someone once said something like “sometimes I’m having a nice time, and then I remember.” Now whether or not I’m really having a nice time when at like 8:30 in the morning knee-deep into a 22-minute ride on the F train which the conductor has decided to use as his crucible in which to forge a stronger tight-five is debatable. But you get the idea: do we really need the phone to do this to us every day? 

When, recently, something in me told me that I had finally had enough of Google’s photo array testament of my failures and tragedies, I looked up how to make it go away. And it’s rather simple. 

Open Photos → Settings → Preferences → Memories → Hide People & pets 

From here you’ll have the option to show more, less, or completely block out the faces from your past. Whether or not you are possessed of the strength to tap them out of existence is another matter entirely. 

Should you? I don’t know, man. Once I made it to the screen, and those ghosts in the machine were staring right back at me, I suddenly didn’t feel like doing it.