Starting Over on Social

I began using Instagram in the fall of 2013 as a joke.

I vividly remember hearing about the app as a way people in my social circle would share #foodgrams, and the grand totality of the content that I would create for the platform was a mixed bag of over-filtered fast food bags and post meal nearly empty styrofoam plates. To say that I have always been a contrarian when it comes to the “next big thing” in tech surely comes to no surprise to anyone who knows me.

Little did I know that I would become one of “those people.” 

As I began to learn the ins and outs of photography, I realized that there was an entire community that I could access right in the palm of my hand. Because I was not always known for my tact in real life situations during my late teens / early 20s, the idea of creating a community online was extremely appealing. I could curate a persona that reflected who I wanted to be rather than who I actually was. It was the purest form of “fake it til you make it.”

Don’t get me wrong, I have made friends via social platforms who have come to be amazing collaborators, and in many cases, close friends IRL, but out of all of the connections I made via “the ‘gram,” these were not common. 

So much for being a contrarian. 

In late 2014, just off of a Broadway national tour and back to the grind in New York City, I realized that I didn’t want to be relegated to waiting tables and decided to dedicate even more time leveraging Instagram to not just build my own influence but having just joined the team at Tony Howell + Co. to help other artists do the same. I began to explore every growth strategy I could find and worked around the clock to take advantage of every new strategy I found in the marketing space. So much for being a contrarian. 

Anyone that worked in social marketing around this time probably remembers the glory days of Instazood, Manychat, and the wild wild west era of Facebook advertising, and in reality it seemed to make the process easy. I began to treat the profile less like a community building tool and more as an advertising engine, but this could only go on for so long. 

The tool that I had hoped to use to build a community was increasingly like sitting in a crowded room of strangers. I did everything I could for years to create a presence that was based on who I wanted people to see me as instead of who I really was. It wasn’t until 2020 that I realized how lonely it is when searching for community online. I was increasingly driven to create based on the cheap serotonin boosts, and I found the only reason I was holding onto this account was I had, even if it was unintentional, based my identity on my online presence. This desperation to stay “top of mind” only increased with the advent of TikTok and IG Reels where content is even more disposable.

There’s a life outside the algorithm that is desperate to be lived.

This past autumn, I found myself mindlessly scrolling through my feed and realizing just how out of touch with much of what was being curated for me, and I decided to try to clean up the accounts that I was following only to be hit with a 2 week action ban for being suspected of being a bot - a truly poetic occurrence seeing how that’s exactly how I felt when using the platform for long periods of time: soulless, impersonal, and like I was spinning my wheels to benefit a billion dollar corporation.

Initially, it was frustrating, but if there was a blessing in disguise that made a difference this year, this was a big one. For the first time since I graduated from college in 2013, I didn’t post anything. After the first week, I stopped logging in every day. I read 2 books. My gym routine became more consistent. I expanded my volunteer duties. I began to engage with my friends outside of sharing whatever meme was making the rounds that week. 

After the 2 week ban was lifted, I found that I had no desire to return to it all. 

I realized the mental junk food I had been feeding myself for years was inadvertently bringing more stress to my subconsciousness. Unsurprisingly it has been shown that comparing the levels of boredom and fatigue throughout the workday in conjunction with phone usage during breaks does not alleviate negative feelings but often make them worse.

Maybe if I had spent more time reading, I would have realized it sooner.

While I can’t leave the social media sphere completely as someone that produces for a digital medium, I am much more at peace to simply share my work without expectation. I have a wonderful group of friends and family, a loving fiance, and a very silly doodle that are far more effective at making me feel valid than any like, follow, or share ever could. 

There’s a life outside the algorithm that is desperate to be lived. Even as I vehemently denied it, I had never realized how much agency I was giving to these platforms to determine the value of my art. Not to say that everything I will ever make will be good, but I am positive that it will bring me what I was chasing when I began making art so many years ago: joy.