Becoming Less Content Making Content

Inspecting my content creation station..

Before you read this, you might want to consider reading the last post about my social media approach, for context.

I’m going to eat my words here a bit. I’m about 2 months into my content creation journey and I’ve posted every single day. However, I’ve run into a few unforeseen consequences and have some new things to consider.

The first of which is the time I’m spending on social media. This is by far the biggest cost associated with this endeavor. Although I’ve tried to just post and ghost.. I always find myself doom scrolling. The words of my younger brother have been ringing in my ears since the time he told me that I just needed better discipline to overcome this (maybe he’s right) but it seems more and more like a losing battle every day. I genuinely wonder if it’s reasonable to expect myself to be able to resist the pull day in and day out while I’m literally on the app.. to me it almost seems like telling a recovering heroin addict to get their needle all set up right in the vein but just don’t shoot it..everyday.. How reasonable is that? Maybe that analogy is a bit extreme but maybe not.. these algorithms aren’t getting any worse..

If I’m being honest, spending time on social media and the effect it has on me is probably the most unhealthy thing in my life right now as well as my biggest struggle. I’m just a worse human all around when I doom scroll. It wastes so much of my time and tanks my mental health. Of all the things that stand in my way and what I want to accomplish and the life I want to build, tiktok style feeds of content feel like a 1000 foot high impenetrable barrier that is realllly hard to not look at..

Before I talk about some possible solutions I want to acknowledge the fact that I’ve stuck with it this far and my top performing posts are all relatively recent. I’ve also pretty much overcome caring what anyone is going to think of me and I rarely cringe at myself or my posts anymore and it’s all starting to feel more natural so that’s progress and I’m proud of myself for that.

Now, solution wise, I’ve tried to use the meta business suite app and website so I can still see comments and DM’s and engage with people without being exposed to feeds. However, among other things, the app and website are incredibly glitchy and hardly useable (most likely on purpose). So that’s a no go.

Recently, I’ve been just posting in the morning and literally locking my phone in a box for the rest of the day but, a lot of days, I just dig it out of there and doom scroll and the solution is becoming less effective by the day. It’s the real life version of when I try and hide the apps in folders deep in my phone but just get super fast at navigating to them..

The most successful strategy I’ve found so far is when I would delete all my social media apps except for 2 hours on Saturday where I would download them all, post, reply to DMs and scroll until my timer went off. This worked incredibly well except for the fact that I could only post once a week. Maybe posting once a week would be better? Less quantity more quality? There are definitely artists that I love who don’t post that often but I still love them and see their content and engage with it etc..

Right now I’m hesitant to quit or slow down because I don’t want to give up. Maybe I need to just keep trying, try harder and deal with the consequences and not complain.. I’m just starting to catch on so giving up now seems like I would just lose my progress. I would like to eventually find a way to keep the community and communication aspect of social media without being exposed to the endless feeds of content that I didn’t subscribe to and actually don’t want to see.

I also have to grapple with the idea that contributing to social media is just wrong and I shouldn’t be pouring my time, energy and attention into this thing that I don’t even like and know is actively bad for me and pretty much ruining society. I can justify it by saying that it’s positive content and is aimed at improving peoples lives but at the end of the day that’s just cope. I often wonder what would happen if I just put all the time and energy I spend on social media, into my art and vision. Maybe this whole social media send will bring me right back to what I really should be doing..

Unless my brain really decides to go rogue, I’m going to just keep posting everyday until the end of March and then I’ll really reevaluate and make a decision. The end of march is also the end of the time that my housemates and I agreed to give living in LA our best shot before deciding if we want to move or stay. So that will be good timing. You can read all about where I’m at with that in this blog post if you missed it.

As always, I’m happy to receive feedback, advice or to just have a conversation about any of the topics on this blog! Don’t hesitate to comment or reach out via social media

(@danny_suede on all platforms)

I’m glad you’re here and thanks for reading <3