We’re not meant to stare at our phones for several hours every day. As Tuğba Avci says:

“It isn’t easy, but we need to start treating our mental and emotional health with the same importance as our physical health. You wouldn’t run a marathon every day, would you? So why do we subject ourselves to this communication madness for 12 hours straight?”

We make ourselves more available to anyone at any time, as we might be on several different social media platforms and their DM inboxes and replies, Slack channels and Discords, and managing multiple email inboxes.

As Seth Godin recently wrote:

“You might not have thought you’d be spending seven hours a day reading the internet, or most of your free time posting and responding, but that’s what the social media companies have pushed us to do.

We’re so scared of leaving social media because we’ve been led to believe we’ll be alone without it.

So, how can we possibly live without social media?

We read books. Magazines. Visit our library and local bookstores. Join a knitting club or take a photography course. Learn a new skill or a language (or two).

We can play shows in weird venues. We do book clubs in diners (or Zoom). We make comic books and zines, podcasts on cassettes, and screen print our own posters.

We build websites, and we update them. We send newsletters that aren’t just digital product catalogs. We buy photo prints and postcards and vinyl from our friends, and if we’re broke we at least tell our friends about the cool things our friends are making.

We stop talking about the 900 things we read yesterday and instead tell stories of shit we’ve done, places we’ve been. Trust me, you’ve got stories.

We host dinners without cell phones. We make breakfast for friends. We talk up our friends who do good work with people who can hire them.

We start radio shows at the local college, make ambient music, make short films with our iPhones, and bring together friends to premiere our work over pizza and seltzers.

None of this is a guarantee. None of this goes viral, or brings in 100 new subscribers, or pays your rent.

None of this is easy.

People working at social media platforms made sure that posting a video is as easy as possible. That makes everything else feel like hard work.

But we need to do hard work because when done often enough, with good people, we create a scene and build culture. That’s how we find our people and start feeling less alone in all of this, because we can’t hang out at the food court at the mall on Friday nights forever.

Let’s start hosting our own Zoom calls, and meeting in basements, studios, and backrooms to create the creative world we want to inhabit.