The thrill is gone

Falling out of love (at last) with social media

Maybe it’s the change of the seasons. Maybe it’s my month-long preoccupation with my looming oral surgery and then the aftermath of that surgery. Maybe it’s getting old or my new exploration of witchiness and magic. Maybe I’m just a very slow learner.

I don’t know the exact cause, I just know that after roughly fifteen years, I am finally over social media.

I’ve wanted to be over social media for a very long time. I’ve known, intellectually speaking, that social media was making me miserable in countless ways. I’ve understood for the past year or so that picking up my phone and scrolling through the Insta is totally an anxiety response and not at all a good one. Nothing about social media makes me less anxious.

I knew that during the pandemic, my relationship to social media became especially toxic. You know, the doom scrolling. But also the scrolling in search of some little ray of hope in the darkest days.

Social media (Twitter, specifically) helped me get my agent and through Sonia Weiser’s newsletter of calls for pitches, helped me get several essays published. But I lost the agent. I hope the essays did some good for someone out there. They didn’t land me a book deal. They didn’t go viral. I didn’t go viral. Substantially, my life was unchanged.

Maybe that’s because, substantially, our lives are almost always unchanged. Does going viral really change who you are? I don’t know. I know that publishing books didn’t change much in my life, except that now I can say I published some books. I don’t even think this is a bad thing. It might be good that my life is mostly unchanged. I like my life. The idea that you’ll hit some social media lottery and your life will be forever altered is part of the seduction of social media and also a part that I’m done with.

Twitter had some practical applications. I can’t lie about that. I guess all social media did at some point. But then the X era began and everyone tried to figure out what the next Twitter would be. Over the last year, I’ve joined Post, Notes, Threads, BlueSky, and…I think there’s one other so obscure and so brief I’ve totally forgotten it.

With each new social media darling, we all asked ourselves, was this it? Was it a good fit? Would it save us? Could we trust the tech bros behind the curtains this time (spoiler—the answer is always no)? Notes would be better because it was attached to Substack, which compensates writers and is all about community and is just, you know, super different from those “legacy” social media apps. BlueSky would be better because it was curated or something. Threads would be better because…I can’t remember why Threads was going to be better.

This picture doesn’t do the grasshopper justice, but you get what I’m saying.

With each new social media app, I jumped in, hoping that this would be the one that worked for me. I’d get in early, on the ground floor, and I would tear it up. Accrue thousands of followers in a day with my witty first post. This time, it would work. This is the eternal seduction of social media. Instant fame for all of us if we just post often enough and cleverly enough. If we game the algorithm right. It’s waiting. It will happen. And in classic American meritocratic-myth bullshit, if it doesn’t happen for you, well, it’s your fault, isn’t it, you colossal dumbass?

Last week, I finally got onto BlueSky with all the rest of the cool kids (thanks, Eli). It does seem fairly close to Twitter. I don’t know what the curated part is, but who cares? All the old favorites are there, doing their thing. Telling you what shows to watch. Being snarky. Feeling very worried about [insert global crisis of the week]. Bragging about having accrued a thousand followers in a day. You know, the usual.

Which is all fine, only I could care less. Don’t get me wrong. I still look at the app, probably about once a day. I scroll through about five posts. Same with Threads. I look. I see the same old stuff. I get very, very bored. I put the phone down. The next time I go to pick it up, my brain whispers to me, “There’s nothing interesting there.” And instead of even opening the app, I put my phone down and go back to reading. Or knitting. Or just staring out the window. It is amazing.

Maybe these new apps are boring to me because I follow so few people and so few people follow me. That’s entirely possible. I still don’t care. Maybe it’s because their algorithms aren’t as good as the old ones.(2) If that’s true, may the algorithms never get any better.

But also maybe, just maybe, I’m able to put the phone down so quickly or never pick it up in the first place because I’ve crossed some amazing line and on the other side, social media is just so fucking boring. And pointless.

The other day, I did a spell in my backyard and when I went to get up at the end, I bent over and found myself eye to eye with a grasshopper, perched on a blade of grass, staring right back at me. He was a mix of bright green and brown, more flamboyant than the average grasshopper, I thought. Maybe it’s weird to think a grasshopper can have an expression on its…face, but he looked so amused. So knowing.

That, friends, was exciting. Bending over in the yard, staring at a grasshopper. Reading posts where people debate the correct way to respond to the violence in the Middle East? Or brag about those thousands of followers they’ve already acquired? Not so exciting. The thrill is gone.

Or maybe it’s more accurate to say that the thrill has shifted. Watching the trees on the hillside out my window slowly change? Thrilling. Or the way the spire of the church is slowly revealed as the leaves fall? Also, thrilling. The taste of my first English muffin after two post-surgery days of liquid food? Ecstatic. The surprising things my students have to say sometimes? Yes, fascinating.

The view from my window, where the colors are changing.

I’m not quitting social media. I don’t need to anymore. Like all things, it’s a tool. Sometimes I might want to see what the special is at my local restaurant. Or whether the library’s closed today. I might even post about stuff I have going on, but I’m not expecting much in the way of return. It’s all like a message in a bottle. Send it out into the world, sure, but don’t count on it to save your life. You have to do that yourself.

In the worst days of my social media consumption I was on my phone for over two hours a day. This is well below the national average of three hours and fifteen minutes. Or the average when I’ve asked my students, which is as high as seven or eight hours a day.

Still, two hours a day is a lot of time. Fourteen hours a week. Over two days per month. Twenty-four days out of the year and we only have about 28,000 days in the average life.

What will I do with all that time if I’m not looking at social media? I have no idea. More grasshoppers, maybe? The possibilities are endless. And thrilling.

Hey, come see me this weekend, Saturday, October 21, from 10-5 at Joseph-Beth Booksellers in Lexington for the Kentucky Book Festival. It’s always a great time and I’ll have some book stickers to give away. You can also buy copies of all three of my books and get them signed.