If you’ve ever seen the movie “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” then you’re familiar with the concept of proactively scrubbing certain memories from your brain. Things that you record online constantly spark our memories, and there are even services that do it on purpose. Timehop and Google Photos have elements of it and so does Facebook’s “On This Day” feature.

The daily reminder of stuff that’s happened on that day in the past can be awesome. It can also suck serious ass and trigger you into depression. I’m not kidding. I’ve had things pop up about events or people that made me shed a tear.

Today, Facebook has launched controls to let you filter out some of those bad memories. Simply go to your “On This Day” page and then click on “preferences.” Then you can enter a date or person to have content filtered out the next time that date or person is about to be shoved into your unsuspecting face.

You can turn notifications off for this feature entirely and never look at them, but there are times where it’s cool to remember what happened on this day five years ago. Just not when it’s something that might gin up sad feels. Then again, sometimes it’s nice to remember…because being shown what upsets us reminds us that we’re human.
