I Hate Social Media

Social Media is Terrible

Ohara Koson // Irises

A note: I have a Patreon and am cooking up some amazing courses over the next few months (including a group social media purification), many of them pre-recorded to do on your own time. Please come join!

I lasted a little over a month back on social media. It was fun and weird to watch the progression of my experience. First it was fun! Seeing all my friends and people I hadn’t interacted with in so long. Kids had grown, people’s lives had changed, and I happily exchanged messages and interactions. I especially loved being back on Instagram, but eventually activated my Facebook again too (that only lasted a week and may have been the incitement to me leaving everything again).

Within the first two weeks of being back, I noticed the threads of my focus fraying. I felt confused. What did I want? Part of this is a product of me being a writer and having started a podcast (which I’ve decided to pause). How do I market things?

But it wasn’t just that. It was all my old anxieties about how I’m being seen, about how it’s impossible to express my full self on social media.

I no longer have FOMO. I’m pretty content in my life (although big changes are coming), but I am a naturally self-conscious and anxious person, and through this little experiment it was clear to me that social media activates my anxiety and exacerbates my self-consciousness.

It took me years to feel just how much social media affects me. I was in it for so long that I thought it was natural to feel heart-crushing fear after posting a tweet or intense anxiety after sharing parts of myself. Now that I’m more clear-sighted, I see the conflict. I want to be seen, but one cannot be fully seen on social media. Social media inevitably flattens ideas and turns people into distilled versions of themselves, burning through their complexities.

A tweet captured my feelings (ironic, right?) and Twitter is the only account I’ll keep active, to post this newsletter and offerings. Natalie Lima (a lovely human as far as I can tell (and a gifted writer for sure)) tweeted this and I was like, yes. That’s what I’m talking about. She’s not talking about leaving social media, but she is voicing (through Alexader Chee’s advice) a major pitfall of social media for writers and creatives. Our creative energy can be funneled into social media, leaving only the leftover splashes for our real work.

That’s the primary reason I am again taking a hiatus, and am leaning towards quitting indefinitely. It wasn’t only my anxiety, but the time and energy I spent scrolling and thinking about what to post. I had a thought and posted it on Twitter instead of exploring the thought as I would in an essay (or in this newsletter). Once I posted it, it was out in the world and I’d forget it. The thoughts I post are never fully explored or developed, because how can they be in such a short space?

Facebook, too, proved to be too much for me. A well known memoirist reviewed a book by a less well known memoirist. I had thoughts and feelings and so did everyone else. What astounded me was the comment thread of thoughts and feelings, and how much it felt like a proving ground for people’s intellect and experiences. I myself fell into the trance of needing to prove that my thoughts and feelings were worthy. But no one was actually talking to each other. They were agreeing or disagreeing. That’s it.

There’s more to life than agreeing or disagreeing. Having an opinion is not a binary but a gray area. Social media inherently lives on the binary edges of the gray area. We have to speak to each other in order to dip our feet into the gray paint (or, you know, write an essay).

Ohara Koson

So, my accounts are deactivated again and Twitter is blocked on my phone so I don’t use it. That’s what’s best for me. I’m once again exploring the richness of my own experience, reading more books, and taking more walks. It feels like a good decision to make as the days get longer, too.

I’m also back to work on my book, which still doesn’t have a pub date. I’m revising it. I asked for a week of “vacation” from work so I can dive in and get as much done as I can. The pages are in a three-ring binder and I flip through them every day with my pen, making notes and trying to get as far through the text as I can so it will be as done as it can be by that one week I have. Writing a book and working full-time is incredibly challenging, but hopefully when I give it back to my editor it may get a pub date, and I may be able to look forward to its being published, and hopefully I can make it something good.

Speaking of my book, fire season has already started in Southern California and I have a bad feeling about this season in general. After last year, when the western skies were choked with smoke thick enough to make noon seem like midnight, I was hoping for a reprieve. But I don’t think there’s going to be one. It makes my book feel urgent. I want to get the word out about solutions, about how to move forward, but luckily there are many other writers and scientists who feel that sense of urgency, too. Unfortunately our cultural obsession with money, with the bottom line, is preventing us from making the changes we need regarding climate change. As usual. We are…so dense. So attached to our conveniences.

Here are some things I’ve been into these past couple weeks:

• I’m reading Claudia Rankine’s Just Us. It’s fucking beautiful. It’s so good. I can’t even write about how good it is. I’m really into the way she examines race in America and the way she used media in the text itself. The pages are glossy and thick and, like her other book, Citizen, there are pictures and social media posts and all of those culturally relevant things. I’m also grateful for how she unabashedly examines whiteness, because it helps me see my own whiteness and helps me question the ways in which I move through the world. I wish I could take har class at Yale.

• I came back around to this essay by Sabrina Orah Mark, which was written around this time last year when we were all obsessed with baking bread. After reading it I bought her book (published by Dorothy, which is a fantastic publishing project) Wild Milk. It’s good; highly recommend. The essay is surrealist and present and beautiful.

• I read/listened to Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro. The audiobook is read quite beautifully. I listened to it while cleaning and on breaks from nannying and was reminded of Never Let Me Go which is a book I’ve read several times. Ishiguro relies on the unreliability of his narrators to create intrigue and meaning— the book almost felt like a retelling of The Velveteen Rabbit, in classic Ishiguro style. I loved it.

• I’ll embed some music I’ve been loving below.

There’s so much I want to add and so much more to write, but I have a weekend of yoga teacher training so this will have to suffice.