On Being Social (media-addicted)

and trying to make it better.

Most of my mornings start like this. I make coffee, light some candles, and curl up with a book or magazine to read for about an hour. Sometimes I journal. It’s a time I hold sacred. The light is just starting to sneak over the west hills and slip through my windows and the only sound is the birds. It’s when I feel the most grounded in my thoughts and feelings. Sometimes I do nothing. I just sit there and let my mind wander. Story ideas often come to me during this time. It’s really lovely.

But that feeling doesn’t last. A couple hours later, my brain starts to feel fluttery, like a buzzing bee that accidentally flew through a window and now it can’t find the sliver of space leading back to fresh air.

When I’m reading or writing first thing, it’s easy to focus. I don’t have to reread one paragraph five times and words flow out as easily as they enter. But eventually it’s time to work and I open my laptop or my phone. Not long after, I feel my attention span collapsing in on itself.

About a month ago I decided caffeine was the problem—this twitchy brain feeling arrived after several cups of coffee. So I switched to decaf, which has helped a little.

But the switch from focused morning energy to flitting half thoughts and brain fog hasn’t gone away.

And then it occurred to me that I start consuming something else, an hour or two after waking up.

Social media. Which seems to have a similar effect as too much caffeine. As soon as I enter the never ending scroll of Twitter or Instagram, my brain starts bouncing from one thing to another so quickly, I can’t complete a single thought. I start scanning instead of reading, because that’s how timelines train our brains to operate. And suddenly I can’t get through a complete paragraph of anything without clicking another tab.

I think we’ve all spent more time on social media this past year than we care to admit. Along with Zoom and other awkward video conferencing experiences, social media has been a window to corners of the world we haven’t been able to visit in person.

But it is also a mirage. A window that leads to a room that is in fact, still our own room. And I keep running into walls. Writing… TWITTER scroll scroll scroooooooooll… writing writing… FACEBOOK MESSAGE… emails… INSTAGRAM STORIES… INSTAGRAM STORIES… instagram stories. emails. NEWS ALERT. LinkedIn? Why not.

Halfway through a sentence, my phone lights up and my hand twitches away from my keyboard and suddenly I’m not writing anymore but smacking into the glass pane of a retweet.

These are insignificant things—a retweet, a like, a comment—and still, my little bee brain buzzes with empty adrenaline and I smack myself against the glass again and again, knowing this is not the direction I’m meant to be flying, but scrolling some unrelated thread of mostly strangers saying mostly unimportant things nonetheless.

Perhaps it is pointless to bemoan social media. It is an element of the modern world that is both unavoidable and a constant choice, ubiquitous and discretely tucked into our pockets or a tab next to the one we’re working on. It’s there, whether we like it or not. If you don’t consume it directly, you’ll likely find yourself sucking on the second hand smoke of a Tweet mentioned in an article and dammit, now you want a drag, straight from the source. Wait, who said what? I better go look.

As writers, it’s a big part of our work. It’s where we find editors and share our published pieces and connect with other writers. It’s where some of us draft ideas in progress or develop our “brand” or exercise our voice. It is a space for words so it can be embraced as a collection of publishing platforms by which no one will edit or cut them but you. I’ve written some of my favorite little collections of words on Instagram.

And yet, no matter how much we scribble on them, social media can still feel like a series of fun house walls, reflecting our insecurities and luring us down narrowing hallways until we’re suddenly trapped in the dead end of our own self image looking confused.

Does it have to be that way?

I recently read Patricia Lockwood’s devastating and hilarious new novel, No One Is Talking About This, about a woman whose life revolves around “the portal” which is a barely fictional version of “the internet.” It’s a disturbingly realistic portrayal of how social media can slip into our psyches and take the place of independent thinking and real connection to the physical world.

Why were we all writing like this now? Because a new kind of connection had to be made, and blink, synapse, little space-between was the only way to make it. Or because, and this was more frightening, it was the way the portal wrote. —Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

But do writers have the option to not be online? A huge part of what all of us do as writers takes place there, and I worry there is no escaping that, unless you’re already the kind of famous writer who gets direct calls and emails from people who want to give you work.

Not to mention, our writing directly benefits from these platforms. I would have no idea how to start investigating a new story and finding sources without the accessibility we have to complete strangers online.

How would we even know what to write about if we don’t stay up on what’s happening and what people are already saying about it?

On a slow news day, we hung suspended from meathooks, dangling over the abyss. On a fast news day, it was like we had swallowed all of NASCAR and were about to crash into the wall. Either way, it felt like something a dude named Randy was in charge of. —Patricia Lockwood, No One Is Talking About This

So how do we mediate our social media time for ways that feel good and necessary instead of absolutely terrible?

One answer, I think, is inquisitiveness. Or intentional curiosity. Approaching social media with inquisitiveness and curiosity makes it a tool for learning and exploring, not just skimming and leering.

Which I would say comes naturally to most writers. It’s why we want to pull apart and reconstruct the world around us with language; we want to know more.

Unfortunately the pandemic forced us to bury our natural urge to be curious about the real world beyond our screens. We had to be content with the walls of our rooms. It was safer to stay online. So we scrolled. And scrolled and scrolled. I think that’s why, despite social media being a part of my life since I first dropped a bunch of Dixie Chicks lyrics on a Myspace page in high school, it feels especially icky right now. The world is opening back up, and I’m still scrolling.

So now I’m making a concerted effort to break away from the strange comfort and convenient avoidance that social media allows. And I’m trying to use it only as a conduit to real life, with a focus on searching, discovering, and learning. But more than anything—limiting.

I’m also reminding myself that I’ve found the seeds of so many story ideas on social media. I found Instagram psychic-mediums, a pipeline protest, and a penpal group, all of which led to story ideas and published pieces.

What made those instances beneficial instead of distracting, was the desire to know more. And the steps that followed.

I reached out to the psychic-mediums and scheduled phone calls so I could ask what it’s like to talk to ghosts. In the instance of the pipeline protest I first stumbled upon in an event announcement on Instagram, I went to the protest in person, met people, exchanged emails, and one year later found myself moving to the place where the pipeline was being proposed and spending several months covering the resistance. I wrote letters to penpals with a pen and paper.

There are so many stories to dig into on social media.

But we have to take the time to pause and let our own brains think about those stories, rather than bouncing off of them and buzzing to the next.

We also have to remember that social media is actually a window to real people and we can get so much more out of it if we treat them as such.

That means responding to people on social media because you want to better understand what they’re saying, or to ask a question, or challenge it in a way that might actually lead to dialogue. It means connecting with people you genuinely want to connect with, not connecting with them because they have a large following and maybe some of that clout will transfer to you. It means curating feeds that feel like genuine reflections of your interests, and exploring those interests beyond the fleeting glance at a photo—really reading the stories and knowledge and opinions that are generously and passionately shared in these spaces.

And for me, it means spending significantly less time with all of it. Because all of those benefits (other than convenient access, maybe) exist outside of social media, too. In 3-D and full color.

Of course, that’s all easier said than done. Experts have spent A LOT of time and money devising ways to make social media as mindless and addictive as possible.

But we do have the power to fight that and engage with these platforms productively, refusing to let them steal our energy and attention.

This past year, we all retreated into our online bubbles in a way that wasn’t just comforting—it was encouraged. But now the window to the outside world is opening. In many places, vaccines are making it safe to return to a slightly altered version of life as we knew it.

And that can be kind of scary.

I’m ready to be out there—in the sense of being outside, engaging in the world and also in the sense of returning to the creative ambitions that felt stalled during peak pandemic distress. But it’s still tempting to scroll and avoid the work and ideas-in-progress that require our focused attention. It’s tempting to scroll instead of pitching that next big story idea. It’s tempting to scroll instead of sitting with our thoughts and giving them space to turn over and develop. It’s so easy to quietly consume instead of creating the things you know you have inside of you, waiting to come out.

I want to spend more time creating and less time consuming. So this week I’m trying a few things to reduce the distracting brain buzz of endless social scrolling, in hopes of feeling more present and engaged in the real world.

1. Turning off notifications on my laptop and my phone.

2. Installing an app to limit the time I spend on social media each day.

3. Designating one day for networking and pitching and one day for compiling the Tuesday opportunities newsletter, which are all social media-heavy tasks. (And I hope that round-up allows you to decrease the amount of time you spend on Twitter and get right to the pitching instead!)

4. Not social media before 11am or after 6pm.

I would love to hear the good things you’ve gotten out of social media. How has it enhanced your career? And how have you found ways to limit the activities that distract from your work? How do you use social media in ways that feel good and how are you avoiding the activities that do not?

To start, I’m going for a walk And grabbing a coffee.

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That’s all for today friends. If you’re a paid subscriber, I’ll be back in your inbox tomorrow with a big round-up of grants, fellowships, inspiration, and of course pitch calls!

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Stay inspired,

Britany