For the Love of Social Media

how the Instant Gratification of IG clouds creativity.

When I look back into my past I see a writer. When I peruse the corners of my mind that hold the memories of my pre-social media self I see someone different. I see someone more creative. Someone more fulfilled. Someone who views the world clearly and differently.

I’ve been sitting with this screen for over 90 minutes now, unsure of what to write. I had a pretty regular week for the most part. Work, vet visit, cooking, more work, exercising. I’m sure that I could extract something out of that to share today but it just wasn’t coming to me.

And so, I checked out my Substack subscriptions and saw this post recently shared all about social media. It’s a good one and you should go check it out. I just so happened to write another piece all about Instagram a while back so this topic has been brewing within me for a bit.

The post I read today really got me thinking and landed me right back here.

I started out on the internet in 2013 as a blogger. At first I was just casually sharing about my life but that quickly turned into me becoming a recipe blogger. I absolutely LOVED it. I was so proud of what I created. It was my thing. I would take my recipe creations to my friends at yoga teacher training on the weekends. I would sit on the train home from NYC and tell strangers that I was a recipe blogger. It was truly the best. But that slowly morphed near the end of its life due to a lot of judgement from people who seemingly mattered to me at the time but are no longer in my life.

I stopped recipe blogging around the same time that I stopped being vegan. 2018. Up to that point social media was easy. I would just share photos of my recipes or other posts that I wrote on my blog. I would comment on other people’s food photos and connect with others doing similar things as I would. And then I would close the app and get back to my life until the next day. Once I closed the chapter of recipe blogging I didn't know where to go from there and I started creating content solely for Instagram. And now, looking back I can see that things shifted right there.

I was no longer heading out into the world as a sponge, ready to soak up the world from my own perspectives, take it home, and wring it out onto the page or into a creative project. Instead, I was aware, alert, and seeking with an undertone of desperation so that I would have some type of content to share.

There is a difference. The difference is creator vs. consumer.

The world needs both, and in the grand scheme of things, almost all of us are both to an extent.

But those who create are a breed of their own. They are the sponges who go out with no expectations, no force. They are the observers. They are the experiencers. And the magic, it happens when they can take those observations and experiences and transform them into an item that assists others in experiencing that thing in some context, as well.

And when I get on social media present day I see a lot of content that is just there for consumption. It’s filler content. It’s content created by a consumer. It has the same trendy audio and similar video or photo because that’s what works to make money and get views. It’s not the intertwining of a persons soul expressing itself in the form of art. No, it’s not that at all. It’s hardly ever that. And it makes sense that it has turned into the opposite because so many of us are stuck in this cycle of scroll holes, fleeting content, and discount codes.

Even though I have participated in all of those in one form or another, that is not what I’m interested in. That is not what I want to put out into the world. Time is precious. Time is valuable. Time is not a renewable resource. I am beginning to take that more seriously than before. I don’t want to waste my time and I don’t want to waste yours. It’s a commitment and a responsibility. And in a world full of people who perpetually victimize themselves, I choose to embody the opposite.

I’m not here to tell you how to create content, or to do so at all. All that I have to offer is a new perspective where we look at things differently. It’s so easy to get caught up in the way things are now. This is how it is now. We are a society deeply immersed in the digital world. Like everything, there is good and bad to that. But I invite you to look at who you were back when we had flip phones and the internet wasn’t in your pocket at any given moment.

What did you like to do? What goals did you have? Why?

I know a lot of people who say that they love to read but now all of their time is sucked up on their phone instead of in a book. Maybe that’s you. Or maybe it’s something else.

Regardless, I’m sure that there is something that you love, miss, and desire that has been floating out at sea. For me, that’s being a writer. Writing a book, courses, more posts like this. My plan is to get into a boat and traverse the waters to pick up that thing that I left floating over the previous years. I’m going to rescue it, put it back in my boat, and sail straight home - a merging of past and present that will create a beautiful future.