Founder of the Social Media Escape Club
I spoke with Thought Enthusiast about Social Media Escape Club, mantras, and Noah Kalina!
“hey… you don’t need to be loud and jump around and do stunts to connect and share your work. Like, you can just be who you are, and that’s enough, and even though the algorithm might not “reward” that, oh well. Being yourself makes it easy to sustain your work because you’re not wasting energy being someone else.”
Read more here.
Love this from Mehret Biruk:
“I ask the empty page a question and every single time, without fail, to my utter shock and delight, it answers. You can’t hear such answer, your truth dying to reach you, when you’re spending all your time inside the deafening internet noise.”
NIKON Z fc
We haven’t gotten any rain in awhile, so it was fun getting up early in the morning to take a little photo walk and capture this scene.
I put this photo in Substack Notes, but taking my own advice and doing my best to also make sure I put this sort of stuff on my own blog, too. Substack can go away tomorrow, but as long as I keep paying my yearly server bill and domain name registration, this post will never go away.
A few words can change your life:
Say it, and be done.
“What did we do before talked about politics all the time?”
A great question posed to me by one of the most politically adpet people I know.
It’s wild, in that social media has conditioned us to constantly talk about politics, at least since 2016 or so.
That was the start of Trump’s foray into politics, when Twitter became as absolute shitshow, but where I’d stay until 2023 for some reason.
But I think social media has just made us think and connect like being online has been the answer the whole time, and everything leading up to it was wrong.
As if the before times, when not everyone had a personal computer at home, or a laptop that they could use on the couch, or a smartphone so they could check it constantly.
Maybe the current mode of living was created by companies that never had our best interest in mind.
Because, honestly, the more we’re online, the more we’re seeing ads. Even if we’re not using an ad blocker, we see ads on social media. Pre-roll ads on YouTube videos.
What if the reason we’re so perpetually online is because it’s in the best interest of those that build computers and sell the ads?
What if it doesn’t have to be this way?
From ‘On a Saturday Afternoon,’ by Aimee Bender:
But even though I am making steady proclamations about who I will go for next, and why, and how it will all be different, it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person. Going through the same routine. Saying the same phrases I have now said many times: the big statements, the grand revelations about my childhood and character. The cautious revealing of insecurities. I have said them already, and they sit now in the minds of those people who are out living lives I have no access to anymore. Awhile ago, this sharing was tremendous; now, the idea of facing a new person and speaking the same core sentences seems like a mistake, an error of integrity. Surely it is not good for my own mind to make myself into a speech like that. The only major untouched field of discussion will have to do with this feeling, this tiredness, this exact speech.
The next person I love, I will sit across from in silence. We will have to learn it from each other some other way.
Ahhh, that line, “it is brutal to imagine the idea of meeting a new person.”
This from Matthew Ferrara:
Imagine if you produced direct content as frequently as you produce social media content. But rather than 1% or 10% of people seeing it, it gets received by 100% of your audience. Got your attention?
Keep making Reels that 95% of your audience won’t see?
Or just email 10 people and reach all 10 of them?
Emailing 10 people means we might get rejected 10 times.
Making Reels is safer, knowing it’ll largely go unnoticed, but we still did “the right thing” according to mass marketing gurus.
