The Party’s Over: The End of Social Media

It’s a crazy thing to say, and an even more arrogant thing to declare, that social media is over, and yet, here i am, making such a bold, wild, egomaniacal claim.

I could cite many reasons why I am making such a bold statement but I will keep the sentiment simple: it just isn’t fun anymore. My attention feels so utterly and thoroughly compromised that I don’t even pause when I come across something beautiful and profound. I don’t even read a full post written by someone I love and adore. Such is the scrolling pattern, and the urgency of my thumb to swipe on, that I don’t even hesitate before flipping away the tragic, the brilliant, and the awesome.

Nothing seems to make an impact, nothing really breaks through – and everything has become a sales pitch – either for the producer of the media themselves, or as a sandwich around their creations. 

Social media has made me poor listener, a terrible observer and a crappy friend. I have traded a like or a heart for a text or a phone call. I have lost my ability to focus and be awestruck. 

My own enormous oeuvre of work has become lost in a sea of stuff — some of that stuff is fantastic, and some of it is mediocre, but no one really knows, because there is just so much of it, that it is impossible to categorize it at all.

So I have decided to pull back and not put my work in to the vacuous void of social media, for now. I still scroll and look, and it still feels like a delicious, if sticky sweet addiction and sugar high to me. I hope to taper that down too. To cut myself off from shares and likes and comments feels less scary and odd than I thought it would. But I’ve been longing for something older, slower, and more analogue. I’ve been aching for a deeper connection to everything – to my friends, to the grass beneath my feet, to the books I read, to my children, and to myself. And with the slow dimming of my incessant desire to scroll, I can slowly feel the quiet settling in – and possibly opening the door to what might come next.