Stop Chasing Social Media

You wake up – and you see posts. You take a break, and you see posts. You chat with friends, and you see… posts. The timeline, the feed, it scrolls and scrolls, why does it keep going, why aren’t you there?

Let’s talk about… social media. A little bit at least, this is too big for one video. How often do you feel like you pick up your phone and get lost on Twitter, or Tumblr, or Cohost, or Bluesky, or… y’know. And when you’re done scrolling the posts, you feel some weird sense of disconnectedness, or guilt? Hard to shake that right?

Maybe you’ve known this already and just need to hear it: it’s an illusion. When you see post after post, scrolling through hundreds in a day, it’s so easy to get lost in the many conversations that occur. People posting art. Replying to each other. Sharing cool photos, witty quips, fun cat videos. And by the time you get to the end you feel like you’ve missed out on the day, and that just makes you feel sour and guilty and it can kill your motivation to create. But the truth? You haven’t missed a thing. Look I’m terrible at math but even I get how unbalanced the numbers are here: people you follow, times the posts they make, the replies, the reposts, not even counting sites that “recommend” more to you. You’ll NEVER win, it never stops, and it’s impossible to keep up!

These sites are MADE to make you feel like this. They operate on “engagement”. That’s a core business metric for social media, because engagement means advertisers, customers, and eventually money. They make you feel good for scrolling and posting and interacting, and make you develop habits to keep returning. This then makes you feel bad when you’re not doing that. This pattern can extend beyond social media: even just seeing a lot of art from different artists can have this effect! Nobody’s making art as frequently as you think, but it’s incredibly easy to slip into a mindset where you feel behind because of the sheer amount of art created in a span of time. There’s a bias towards seeing everyone’s accomplishments and not their struggles; those are rarely shared, but we all have them.

So how do you fix it? I’m not going to tell you to delete your accounts and go silent – I know that we all want to share things we’ve made, art or otherwise. So here’s my thought: keep your accounts, but find other primary places where you can chat with your friends and make a cozy home for yourself online. Maybe that’s a small chat group, or a community of artists of your skill level, or even just a side hobby like gaming with friends. Convince others to join you! A lot of people have the same thoughts of being left behind and need that same push. Like a lot of my other advice, this isn’t an immediate fix, you have to repeat this stuff and convince yourself over time. But give it a try. Find a fun circle for yourself and go make some nice art.