What is social media good for?
unlike war, not absolutely nothing
i.
People, dare I say it, are getting sick of social media. What began as a silent revolution to delete addictive apps, is starting to feel like a rambunctious rebellion. A renaissance.
On the whole, this seems like a good thing. A return from an unhealthy extreme. To the extent people feel bullied and bludgeoned by their social media feeds, anxious and apathetic but too drugged on dopamine to quit, it's exciting to see many decide enough is enough. To stop doing things that make them feel worse about their lives. To realize it matters more to live for themselves than the image they project.
Personally, I don't use any social media outside of Substack. It's probably bad for my career, but I don't even use Substack Notes. I stopped when I realized ten minutes would pass like ten seconds and I'd be left with a lingering feeling of malnourished guilt and permeating numbness, but still wanting more1. Something like the feeling after eating an entire chocolate bar.
It sounds silly to say but I think a surprising amount of a good life is noticing what makes you feel worse and not doing it. Put simply, most of a good life is refusing to do what is bad.
I'm wary of "influencers". Not that they are shallow or simple, money-hungry or malicious, although some are, but because they profit from posing. They profit from making a tantalizing ideal look like their everyday, run-of-the-mill life. To recognize the fundamental falsity behind it, all one has to do is look at the real people they know in their real life. No one has a dream life in reality. Those who get closest, I'm convinced, don't have Instagram at all. They might not even have cell reception.
Oscar Wilde, who famously said all influence is immoral, would probably take this a step further. Wilde, after converting to Christianity in prison, wrote in a letter, "He who would lead a Christ-like life is he who is perfectly and absolutely himself... It does not matter what he is, as long as he realizes the perfection of the soul that is within him. All imitation, in morals and in life, is wrong." In other words, think your natural thoughts and burn with your natural passions. Don't become an actor in a part that was not written for you. Become who you are. Love your fate2. That is the privilege of your lifetime. That is your pathway to bliss.
There's also a strange asymmetry on social platforms where people with the most popular and prolific accounts aren't consumers of other content that’s posted. In other words, they don't eat their own cooking. I remember hearing one viral thread writer on Twitter, with way over 1M followers, admit he doesn't actually use Twitter at all.
It's interesting when the medium betrays the message.
As in, the lifestyle someone promotes online is incongruent with the use of social media required to project that lifestyle. As in, a simple and humble and poetic existence that's constantly posted about cannot, in reality, be simple nor humble nor poetic. The contentedness would curtail the constant posting, or the constant posting would cut off the contentedness.
With a discerning eye, I think you can start to see through the glamor to the grittiness underneath.
Like, if you were really drowning in a sea of happiness while sailing across the blue honey of the Mediterranean, exhaling nothing but bubbles of bliss, would you remember to film each sunset? If you were really immersed in the majesty of the mountain trails, would you be doubling back every five minutes to get your tripod? If you really had a quiet pastoral life with a beautiful home and beautiful wife and beautiful children, would you spend an hour on Twitter every day? I don't know. Maybe you would? But if true happiness is forgetfulness of self, I’d assume that must also include forgetfulness of filming self.
Mind you, I don't think there's anything wrong with making your life look beautiful, as long as viewers understand the art of photography is composition.
Besides, fame, with respect to human flourishing, is a curse. Even the brief brushes I've had with virality were hard and humiliating. I wouldn't recommend it to an enemy, never mind a friend. There's that saying: When you see who the winners are, you have to ask yourself if it’s a game you want to win.
In this sense, I come to my conviction that social media is art. A sacrifice on behalf of the creator to put forth a beautiful, but ultimately illusory, ideal. One that we can all equally gaze in glory at.
But the pernicious part is that it's often art that incites desire. A hunger to possess. Which, James Joyce would argue, is a lower form of art. The highest being sublime art, which produces no lust or longing but rather “aesthetic arrest”. When I read Milton or Tolkien or Austen, I don't want to be them. I don't wish I had written it. I'm too busy being grateful and giddy and baffled by their brilliance. In the presence of the sublime, my mind goes still.
And, because the medium is so casual and intimate, someone speaking to you like they're across the kitchen table, showing the private nooks of their life, sharing in ten seconds what took ten days to make, it's also art that hides art. There's an inevitable concealment of effort that makes it all seem natural.
It takes more effort to make something look effortless. To set the stage so it doesn't look staged. Behind anything aesthetic and tasteful is a foolish amount of labor3.
Take this essay. What you read in ten minutes takes twenty hours of work. And it’s one of the best ideas that’s swirling around my mind, not all the other half-baked theories scribbled in notebooks. Even within this idea, you're reading the twenty percent of the most suave, sensible sentences I wrote. The ones that didn't get cut. The common sense, not all the common nonsense. (Somehow these sentences made it in!)
But I'm left wondering, when it comes to social networks, whether the best antidote is complete abstinence.
I'm left wondering: What is social media good for?
ii.
If you are going to live in the world, there are benefits to living in public. It can be the basis of all sorts of interesting relationships. New jobs, new friends, even new love.
It is a joy to be hidden but a tragedy to never be found4. And we all, in one way or another, deeply desire to be found. Social networks create a space for finding. Where people can see and be seen5.
Many focus on doing the finding, through cold emails or job boards or dating apps, but few think about positioning themselves to be found. The attempt to make yourself easy to find leads to all sorts of interesting questions: If you want to be found, what do you want to be found for? What sort of work would you like to do more of? What interests do you want friends to share? What kind of person would your future husband or wife actually like to be around?
Social platforms, used properly, can make it stupidly easy for cool people to find you.
If they are to be used at all, I think these platforms should be used to share goals and dreams and desires. To share what you are learning, what you think is beautiful, what projects you spend weekends working on, and what you want to accomplish in a decade. To paint a picture of what a good and interesting life looks like to you6.
Like, "Here's the shape of the devastatingly beautiful life I want to build. Here's the person I'm trying to become. Although I will certainly fall short, please let me know if you'd like to help be a part of it. Or build it with me, in some way." By working with the garage door open, someone almost always strolls by and offers to help7.
On the flip side, if you see someone building something interesting or wish you could build yourself, you can ask to be a part of it. When you see something you like (or someone?) you can let them know. Almost no one gets too much sincere appreciation or genuine interest in their work (or love poetry?). With email, it's never been easier.
These days, I think a lot about how I can share more in my writing about what I am like, what I love, and the life I want to build. How I can attract people into my orbit who make me feel alive and true and heard. How I can express myself in a way that searches for specific people who I can forge meaningful relationships with. That's one reason I care about honesty in my writing. By showing what it's like inside my head, people can see if they would like to live there8.
I've made incredible friends online that I talk with every week. But still, there's a certain depth of connection that a screen can never substitute. Chemistry needs contact.
The completion of a social network is to return from the universal back to the personal. From the vague infinite to the voluptuous finite. That's the final stage of the Network State. Find your tribe of people online but then co-locate in a physical community. Or, more easily, go and meet them in real life! Because, in the end, real life is what counts.
Where effort and intention are sown, love will grow.
Write you again soon,
If you find my writing meaningful, you can become a patron. Patrons get to read more of my work and support the production of free essays. Each patron’s support makes a genuine difference.
If you love my work but can't afford to be a paid subscriber at the moment, you can contribute in a smaller way and buy me a coffee.
👋 what i’ve been up to:
Shoveling snow and stacking wood and surviving the cold. Although I love the ritual and slowness of winter, it’s about this time of year I miss the long shoeless days of summer.
After finishing The Bible and Saint Augustine’s Confessions in January, I’m deep-reading Paradise Lost by John Milton, a difficult but sublime work of literature. In this season of my life, I’m treating reading as an extreme sport, averaging 4 hours a day.
I watched one Miyazaki film in mid-January, then fell in love and went on to watch another four.
📸 photos i took:
February in Ontario.
My mind goes to David Foster-Wallace explaining how he didn’t own a TV because he would watch it all the time. And, convinced there was always something else better than whatever he was watching, he’d just flip channels ferociously. DFW decided it was too much for his “sick little head”.
Joseph Campbell: “Whatever your fate is, whatever the hell happens, you say, 'This is what I need.' It may look like a wreck, but go at it as though it were an opportunity, a challenge. If you bring love to that moment--not discouragement--you will find the strength is there. Any disaster you can survive is an improvement in your character, your stature, and your life. What a privilege!”
There's a word in Italian for this: sprezzatura. 'Studied carelessness'.
Paraphrasing a quote I read off memory from some psychoanalysis book.
In the Christian conception of Heaven, every soul will finally shine in all its splendor. Exactly who the person always wanted to be. Exactly who the person, in their deepest heart of hearts, knew they always were.
The attractiveness of Heaven feels similar to the appeal of social media. Everyone is sharing their ideal. Who they wish they were, if not for the worldly weight, the fear and the fatigue and the difficulty of loving others. Social media sublimates this divine instinct to be seen by others as we’ve always wanted to be seen.
That, in my estimation, explains its rampant and resilient popularity. More than the animal brain argument, that reduces humans to rats with a cocaine pellet dispenser.
To find your people specificity and spikiness is important. I never fail to be surprised by how much vulnerability and weirdness and wonkiness, or just being cringe, is applauded by others and rewarded by the internet.
This, mind you, is more pleasant and productive than complaining about politics.
This was Henrik Karlsson’s best dating advice in Looking For Alice.
If reading the room were an art, I reckon it is, you are a master. Fantastic, insightful article - TY ❤️
Came across your work recently, and really appreciate your perspectives and honesty, thanks for sharing it with the world 🙏