Every morning, I wake up and I check my email, my Instagram, my Facebook, the news. I scroll mindlessly and I haven’t woken up yet. Before I’ve even stepped foot in the shower, I am thinking about what content I need to share today on various social media accounts. Whilst I am in the shower, my brain is thinking up captions and ideas for future posts, that I will forget before I have the opportunity to write down. Honestly, that’s probably for the best. Most shower ideas are terrible.
The point? My brain is constantly switched on. It is constantly connected to the noise; the addiction to sharing, consuming, absorbing, rotting and allowing my self-worth to be further destroyed by this constant state of comparison and self-hatred created by everyone else’s highlights. And the worst part? I know that I am part of the problem. I know that I only share the parts of my life that I choose to. People only want to see the good parts, the happy parts, but in turn it feeds into an epidemic of depression. We’re all complicit in an industry worth millions.
Media outlets constantly ask why so many of us are “all of a sudden” depressed or anxious. But they are one of the biggest parts of the problem. They are the people creating the depression and the anxiety, and yet they are the people who are demonising it, pushing the blame into other directions. Making themselves out to be the warriors against this behaviour.
And then there’s the comments section. I don’t know why I keep going there, because it’s usually a reminder of just how awful people can be. How little filter there is between the thoughts in someone’s head and whether those thoughts should ever be shared. People forget they’re talking to an actual human being with feelings. The cruelty is casual, normalised, and it’s exhausting. It’s another layer of noise that so many of us carry around, one that none of us ever asked for – but somehow we all feel obligated to ensure.
So what is the solution?
We can’t just walk away from social media. We are reliant on it to run our businesses, to stay connected, to find people who understand us and make us feel normal.
But, we can take control how and when we engage with it.
For me, the internet, especially social media, has become so loud and aggressively noisy, that I find it overwhelming.
As a business, it is becoming harder and harder to reach my audience, and it feels like social media is pushing to make sure we share more and more, in a vain effort to reach them. But we’re just killing ourselves, churning out low-quality content that is benefitting no one, but most importantly, it is destroying who we are as people.
So, here is my plan: create less content that has higher value – for both myself and my business.
I want to stop sharing content that is simply there to fill the void, because I want to appease the social media gods. I want to create slowly, with intention, and create things that really matter to me.
I want to slow down. Pause. Focus. Create what really matters.
