Can an artist thrive without social media?

It’s been years since I sat in the bathtub with a cool glass of rose perched on my knee playing Candy Crush until I turned into a prune, but I remember who I was back then.

Tired.

Anxious.

Depressed.

I knew I was wasting my life, but I was also too tired to do anything about it. The only thing I felt I had any real control over was defeating sweet little rainbow hued shapes to level up along a limitless path. I couldn’t do this in real life, so I retreated into a game where it was easy and sprinkled with rewards along the way.

It wasn’t until I realized that the game had trained me to repetitively beep the boops in ways that helped it learn how to trick me into beeping the boops ad infinitum that I finally deleted the app from my phone and walked away.

There were relapses, though, when life got too lifey and I needed to not think anymore. Sitting in therapist’s waiting rooms. Sitting in courthouses. Hiding from my husband because being married, on top of everything else, was too much.

I can’t put my finger on the magical moment Candy Crush left my life for good, but I sense it was around the time I started art journaling in 2017, when I finally had a container into which I could pour all the brain gunk I wasn’t able to put into words.

These days, when I sit down to make art, I spend half the time thinking about how I can turn the process of making art into content. Much of my rare and precious art time is spent:

• tidying my art desk so people won’t be so offended by my process (chaos, messy!) that they miss what I’m doing (arting!)

• thinking about captions and SEO

• wondering which social media platforms will best serve the content

• fucking around trying to get a proper camera angle

• deciding whether I need to adjust the size of my art to fit into an aesthetic grid

• worrying about whether people will leave me mean comments again

• noticing that my nail polish is chipped so I need to do my nails before I record video because people will complain about them

• trying to figure out how I’m going to find time to do all of these art adjacent things while also having time to make art

By the time I get around to actually making art, the idea I was trying to lasso and wrangle into submission has galloped off into the sunset along with my motivation and will to live.

All of this just makes me feel broken. I literally cannot do all of these things. Moreover, I don’t freakin want to. Being an influencer and content creator is great for other people, but I’m not interested in being an entertainer or a salesperson for someone’s useless gewgaws that literally nobody needs. I just want to be left alone to make my art in my happy little art attic, occasionally pop out and say hiiiiiii look at my new arts! appreciate your arts, and then go back into my hidey hole with my dusty old magazines and paints to make more art.

But also, I’m supposed to do all of these things, because this is what it takes to be a working artist in these trying times. It’s not enough to make art. You have to leverage your Triple As (attractiveness/affluence/aesthetic), get out there, and shill your art hard. If you don’t have the Triple As you can try to perform quirky artist, but this is much harder. If you don’t have any of these things, the only option you have left is to trick other people into paying you to teach them how to be successful at the thing you can’t do.

I’m writing this on my phone in the waiting room at the dentist’s office and Twenty-One Pilots’ “Stressed Out” is playing extremely loudly on a crappy speaker above my head, I shit you not. There is nowhere to escape to. “Wish I could turn back time to the good old days…Wake up you need to make money.” I love this song, but it’s boring a hole into my brain.

This is the point where I’d usually get so frustrated and annoyed that I’d stop trying to write in the ten minutes of downtime I’ll have today and check my brain out to mindlessly scroll social media.

I had to stop and think why that seemed like the right thing to do. Like, let’s take an irritating situation and make it better by opening our thinking space up to 298386362671 random internet strangers dumping their drama, trauma, anger, and opinions into it.

That.

Is.

Insane.

And yet, this is how most people function.

If I sound a little cranky and cynical, that’s because I am. What more do you expect from an insomniac perimenopausal woman with seasonal allergies?

And so, for all of these reasons, on Tuesday, October 23, I decided to walk away from social media for the rest of the year.

We are not meant to live like this or create like this.

There are no models for how to go through life without social media anymore. If there are, you’re not hearing about them. Those people are out there living their best lives without feeling a need to cosplay living their best lives for everyone’s commentary, approval, or envy. They’re not trying to sell you an online course about how to achieve this freedom. They’re not digital nomad life coaches. They not trying to make you jealous of their freedom or their success or their simple life. They’re just living.

I want to be more like those people.

BUT

I’m also trying to figure out how to write and make art for a living. I don’t know if that’s possible without social media. Maybe it is. Maybe it isn’t. Frankly, I just don’t give a fuck anymore.

I challenge you to find an artist who will say this out loud and bite the hand that’s feeding their art career.

Most paths to success as an artist (depending how you define success), whether it’s networking with art friends, discovering opportunities to show work, or selling art, are now funneled through social media. If you’re an artist who doesn’t use social media, and use it well, you’re invisible unless you have other privileges like education, gallery representation, a local art community, an agent, etc.

Unlike Candy Crush, I can point to the moment I realized social media had jumped the shark: the rare appearance of northern lights in the lower United States.

Facebook, Instagram, and Threads were awash with pinks and oranges and blues. Everyone was sharing gorgeous photos of the northern lights over their homes in order to induce their family, friends, and strangers to click the like button on their posts. Before long, everyone was staring at their phones, scrolling and clicking, clicking and scrolling, typety-typing comments, beeping all the boops on their phones instead of looking out the goddamn window and enjoying the actual northern lights in front of their fucking faces.

Can you imagine being the northern lights? They rolled into town to give everyone a special light show. Instead of being greeted with wonder, they were greeted by the backs of everyone’s heads because all the silly humans were too busy staring at their phones.

RUDE

But hey, humans are gonna human and the fact that social media is at its core a very silly activity isn’t the thing that put me off it, because I, too, am a silly person who likes attention.

What put me off of it was this post by Meta:

This post wasn’t surprising, but it broke something in my brain because what it really says is this:

Your life isn’t good enough as it is. Here, use our tools to create a better and more socially acceptable life. We’re helpers.

Fifty years from now (or sooner, depending how quickly AI figures out that humans are pests and eradicates us), we’ll scoff at these better living through technology messages in the same way we shake our heads at those midcentury better living through chemistry ads for lead paint, asbestos flooring, and doctors endorsing cigarettes.

(This post brought to you by DuPont, which wiped out my dad’s side of the family.)

It’s already hard enough to figure out whether you’re communicating with a bot or a person using AI to generate their images and words. Now we’ve got purpose-built tools to make us feel even more inadequate as we try harder to pretend our lives are something more perfect than the messy humanity we should be reveling in. The mess of life and our ability to wade through it is what makes us so amazing.

We’re easier to manipulate when pacified with mindless distractions. The almighty algorithm nudges us to fight with each other over the gristle capitalism sells to us as steak.

We are being flattened by capitalism, gaslit into believing that our reason for existence is to create content and sell products so we can fulfill our role as The American Consumer. We are no longer human, we are performing being human for everyone else’s entertainment and commentary. We are losing ourselves in service of filling the coffers of companies that have weaponized the meaning of community for their own profit. We’re shrinking ourselves to fit into our phones and we’re too exhausted from doing so to examine it.

No wonder we’re all distracted, miserable, and defensive.

I’d love to be able to put a bow on this post by offering a solution. I don’t think there is one. Here in the United States, based on our actions, we’re more concerned about protecting our children from words in Judy Blume books than we are protecting them from someone walking into their classrooms and shooting them.

And so, at least until the end of the year, I’ll be over here shouting into the metavoid on Substack exclusively, wearing a sandwich board that says, in big bold dripping red letters:

I am human.

PS – The dolphins would like to have a word with Union Carbide.