ciao, ciao

on: attention, costs, social media

I’m thinking about quitting social media.

The other week, when the TikTok ban was (supposedly) imminent, I deleted the app from my phone. Good riddance. I have generally managed to avoid major struggles with addictive behaviors but good lord, did that feed have its talons in me. Later that evening, I was cooking dinner and I wondered how it would feel to delete Instagram too. Instagram has never been quite as difficult for me to pull away from but it still managed to consume far more of my time than I wanted. Quitting Instagram feels a lot scarier since I need it to ✨Build My Brand✨ and Connect With My Customers so I can theoretically Sell My Art.

I went ahead and gave it a shot anyway. Delete.

An immediate relief…I think that’s a good sign.

The next day when I got home from work, I got some food warming up for dinner and the fire going in the cabin. After scarfing down my chow, I cleared the table and plopped myself on the couch. In an utterly instinctive manner, I unlocked my phone and scrolled all the way over to the main app library where I’d kept TikTok hidden for several months in an entirely unsuccessful attempt to reduce my usage.

Ahh, right. It’s gone.

So I just laid there on the couch and looked at the wall for twenty minutes – it wasn’t really intentional, but I was horizontal already and the firehose of consumption I’d planned to unleash upon myself was not available.  Shockingly (not shocking at all), it felt so nice. Just being for a moment, a break from the constant consumption and production of the day, staring at the static stack of logs that divided me from the outdoors.

The way I’m thinking about it, everything is a trade-off. Social media undoubtedly adds to my life in some ways. I find out about new artists, interesting events, and unique creations. I can share what I do with other people and hopefully inspire them a little bit. I can in some ways connect with real people who I actually care about.

But it also extracts a cost. It’s an insatiable demand for my attention.  It’s an unrealistic presentation of the realities of others.  It’s an utter black hole of time consumption. While in theory these costs could be managed, I’ve found myself completely incapable of resisting their pull.  I feed chips into the machine every time.

I’m a couple of days in now. I miss sharing progress shots of my artwork. I’m finding myself doomscrolling Craigslist as a substitute. The comical frequency with which I reach for my phone as a solution to discomfort is becoming clear. There’s an occasional sense of boredom with my life. When I do pick up my phone out of habit, I’m aware that it’s happening, rather than immediately falling into twenty minutes of dissociation. I can laugh at myself in these moments, grabbing for my phone only to realize that the thing I’m looking for is not there.

Sometimes I find myself watching YouTube as a substitute. It seems a little better because I never struggle to stop scrolling. After I watch something I’m usually satisfied, in contrast to the empty-inside feeling I’d experience after scrolling through TikTok. It’s still a little dissociative and over-consumptive but I can get bored of it, unlike TikTok or Instagram.

This experience is really driving home how often I reach for my phone as an emotional solution. When I’m feeling a little uncomfortable or anxious or scared or bored, I immediately grab my thin grey rectangle rather than even sit with the feeling long enough to consciously acknowledge it.

As always, the unacknowledged feelings are always the most destructive. Just in noticing them, they dissipate. They don’t disappear entirely, but they feel possible to reckon with.

Now that I’m a week or two in, I’m glad to not be so entrenched in algorithmic social media, but I do really miss sharing my process and my art with people on a regular basis. A new option could be using Substack more broadly. I could write a short daily digest from the studio to highlight some work and thoughts from the day. Something that’s sent to you who’ve explicitly requested it rather than having to roll the dice on whether or not an algorithm happens to put my work in front of someone who happens to be interested.

Great, I’m going to do that.

So, dear reader, keep an eye out for some new (semi) daily journals about my days in the studio, my art progress, and more informal thoughts. I’ll still be writing these longer essays from time to time, and hopefully you’ll find the interplay between both interesting for your own life.

Thanks for journeying with me,

Wolf

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PS: When I was debating whether I wanted to stop using algorithmic social media, I put together a little bit of a benefits/costs analysis to try and explore my contradictory feelings about the experience. I found the results quite elucidating, so I’m including them below in case they prompt some realizations for you.

There are benefits and costs to all of our choices and, in the end, all we can do is balance benefits we want with costs we can tolerate.  

What are the benefits I get out of consuming and creating social media?

1. Inspiration from exposure to the creations and activities of others

2. A consoling dissociation from reality

3. Some level of connection with people I don’t see IRL on the reg

4. Validation that my art/life/self is interesting enough for other people to pay attention to

5. Laughs (occasional)

6. A reason to create video that communicates my artwork to others

7. The experience of being seen (through video content) more completely, albeit in a much more controlled environment than the real world could ever offer

8. A deep archive of short clips documenting my artwork process that I create for social media but which also serve a broader value

What are the costs I pay?

1. Time. Sometimes, an utterly embarrassing amount

2. The feeling of dopamine withdrawal after flicking through hundreds of TikToks

3. Attention. I don’t generally have control over what comes across my feed. And to use the platform, I have to make at least a cursory evaluation of each thing I see. The reality is that the vast majority of the content I have to decide whether to watch or pass is not adding to my life

4. A greater influence on my perception of reality by random other people who I’m unable to vet for value-alignment like I would with real people in real life.

5. The jarring return to reality after sinking into TikTok’s warm dissociation bath

6. Exposure to endless advertising

7. Exposure to too many uninformed takes

8. A marked lowering of my perception of the median level of American intelligence (see above: too many bad takes)

9. A poor-quality substitute for my desire for more social interaction. Just enough to keep me from initiating a real-life interaction but not enough to be genuinely fulfilling

10. A narrowing of my perspective of what my art is as I focus on how it performs on social media 

11. A filtered, vetted perspective of the lives of my friends, which means there’s less opportunities for us to actually talk about what we’re up to when we’re seeing each other in real life

12. Decision fatigue