Sort of. Gently. With a good ol’ fashioned midwest goodbye where I slap my knees long after the conversation has died down, give a hearty “welp,” and continue posting my monthly photo dumps and occasionally checking in with friends and watching the reels they send me.
I know, I know, that’s not leaving. But if you’ve ever played Monopoly with a child, you might know what I mean: When you play Monopoly with someone who loves Monopoly, you’re all in; you’re strategizing, scheming, trying to win. When you play with a child, you’re not focused on the game, you’re focused on the child, on everyone having fun, on controlling the experience and making sure you don’t ruthlessly crush their spirit and inspire a lifelong hatred of boardgames. That’s what I’m going for.
Social media is designed to make you spend as much time on it as possible. They have all sorts of nefarious ways of doing this that I plan to read up on later this year (I’ve heard Filterworld by Kyle Chayka is good), but suffice it to say, I trust nothing.
Instagram is the only social media I’ve kept up with—I quit Twitter years ago after being inspired by Amy Poehler’s Yes Please, I never hopped on the TikTok train because I like my attention span as-is, thanks, and I haven’t adopted any of the new platforms because I’m confident they’d have all the same problems as the current ones, just on a smaller scale. Here’s the thing: I just don’t care what most people think.
It’s not that I don’t want to hear opinions that are different than mine—I love that. I welcome that. I thrive on reading widely and learning new things. It’s that I don’t want to hear opinions from people who have no reason to give them other than a crippling self-importance and a depressing need to matter. Whether it’s an influencer monologuing with complete authority on things they know nothing about or an armchair expert commenting with zero forethought or expertise, I’m not all that convinced that the democratization of ideas was an entirely helpful endeavor for society.
I go off a lot about greatness and intelligence and integrity and truth, and social media as it stands is the embodiment of the opposite of all of those ideals. It rewards incendiary content, furthers misinformation, pushes anger and hate and dissatisfaction. It encourages a lack of critical thinking and an immediacy of response. It hijacks your preferences and opinions and actively tries to turn you into a docile, categorizable version of yourself that it can more easily sell things to. It promotes uniformity and calls it individuality.
So I’m done playing the game to play the game.
The why now doesn’t matter as much as the why—it’s been a long time coming, and the straws that broke me are insignificant in the scheme of things. (If you’re curious, it was Instagram’s changed grid size and quietly rolled out inability to search hashtags by “most recent.”) But the primary driving force is that I’ve noticed social media making me miserable for a long time, and I’m trying to do more things that make me happy this year.
I’m not quitting entirely, because I like seeing pictures of my friends’ kids, and I like finding interesting recipes, and I like having a digital photo album of cool things I’ve done. Could I do that on my own? Obviously. But I occasionally thrive off of other people thinking I’m cool and interesting. (Why else do you think I write these newsletters into the void?) I’m going to stop doomscrolling, though, stop engaging, stop reading comment sections and letting myself dump emotional energy into the cavernous maw of these corporate outrage algorithms.
In talking to a friend about it all, she commented that she didn’t want to tune out entirely and keep her head in the sand, but she was also very over the anger and idiocy. I realized in that moment that I’d honestly rather have my head in the sand than thrust into the toxic muck of public opinion and brainrot until I drowned.
But I don’t want my head in the sand, either. Well-researched literature written by experts exists to stay informed. Longform entertainment made thoughtfully exists to stay occupied. There’s a whole world outside of social media, and I want to live in that one, not in the aggressively robot-curated space designed to keep me miserable. (Don’t even get me started on dating apps.)
That same friend went on to say, “Making fun of other people and name-calling on the internet is doing absolutely nothing. If you’re mad, actually do something to change the problems you perceive in the world. Help other people. Hold someone’s hand. Be a nice person. You want the world to become a better place, pick up a shovel.”
At the moment, The Lit Nerds is my shovel. I’m slightly concerned that dropping entirely off of social media will negatively impact the lit mag and the authors we publish, but since I initially created it to make a space in the world that behaved in an idealized fashion and promoted values I wasn’t seeing anywhere else, I think moving away from social media is part and parcel of that pipe dream. Same goes for any books I publish and my existence as an author. I’m not going to compromise my values, nor am I going to make myself a cog in a machine I think is actively harmful to society.
But that’s my soapbox, and if social media brings you more joy than misery, more power to you. There are some very cool things that have come out of it. But either way, in this chaotic new year, I want to ask:
What’s your shovel?
Stay excellent,
Kristen
I recognize that social media isn’t all bad, and some people are making truly original, interesting, useful, fun content. Some of my favorite creators: B. Dylan Hollis (recipes), Adam Aleksic (etymology), Martijn Nugteren (nature photography), Ekaterina Dobrokhotova (magic tutorials), and Sophie Brown (crafts).
I recently wrote an essay for The Lit Nerds on why I love literary magazines and why The Lit Nerds exists. I’m pretty proud of it; check it out.
A friend of mine also recently wrote an essay for The Lit Nerds on Scotch whisky and how it’s intertwined with her living in Scotland, and it’s great. Read it.
Kayla Olson is a lovely author that I connected with on Instagram (another positive!) who sent me a copy of her most recent book, The Lodge, and it’s one of the coziest, sweetest romance novels I’ve read in a while. You should absolutely read it this winter, preferably with some hot cocoa or a latte and your fuzziest blanket.
I recently made these hot cocoa cookies with oversized marshmallows, and they’re phenomenal. 10/10 would definitely recommend for a bad day (or a day spent reading The Lodge!). Honestly, Sally’s Baking Addiction never misses.
Featured image by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
Earthbound, But Aspiring 