A decent ChatGPT prompt could write you some copy for a new product, an upcoming tour, or a fancy new thing. Sure.
“Hey, new podcast episode!”
It just lays out the facts. The dates. The logistics.
But friends, there’s enough safe, dull, dry text out there, and we don’t need more.
Your work comes to life from your magic.
Don’t stop using your magic when talking about your work.
As Courtney Romano wrote recently:
“If you’re not creating an experience (aka something that has ups and downs and richness and depth and confusion and friction and tension and delight), then no one will pay attention. There are just too many other things to do.”
I hate to say you’re competing with other artists, authors, musicians, photographers… but… the people you’re trying to reach are busy watching Netflix, going to shows, walking around bookstores, going to exciting restaurants, swimming, kissing!
You don’t need to buy billboards or hire an agency to get the word out. You don’t need to make “video assets” or use trending audio.
But you must do better than “new thing!”
Paul Rudd doesn’t go on late-night TV shows, say, “Hello, my new movie comes out this Friday,” and walk off set.
He tells stories that aren’t even related to the movie. This comes easy for him because he’s been making movies since the early 90s, but still – HE IS USING HIS MAGIC.
In fact, he started a running gag with Conan O’Brien by not showing a clip from the movies he’s promoting. Instead, he’d show a clip of 1998’s ‘Mac and Me’ over and over again, for many years.
Only Paul Rudd could do that Mac and Me thing because he’s Paul Rudd. No computer – no other human – could provide the magic he brings.
You don’t need to perform outlandish stunts and hacks to promote your finished work, but you can do better than a dumb computer.
As an artist, you’ve got the same spark, the same magic inside you, just waiting to be set free. It probably won’t look like what other people are doing, but it can still resonate with the people you’re trying to reach because it’s 1000% you.
Get off social media if it makes you feel bad.
If social media is killing your creativity, stealing hours of your day (and night), making your mind race, bringing up feelings of “compare and despair,” making you second-guess your work, stealing joy, robbing you of sleep, leaving you depleted, disrupting your relationships, your work, and your art, then maybe it’s time to develop a social media escape plan.
Is being a shell of yourself worth a few likes or sales?
“I’m deleting most of my social media accounts (some of which I’ve had for over a decade) because I noticed they were repeatedly hurting me. And I was letting them,” writes S. Grohowski
Worry less about being “forgotten,” and envision a future when you re-find yourself.
“After two months away from (social media), I feel much less distracted and more grounded, present, and focused on what matters most.,” writes Ashley Neese
Trust that the universe will help you get your work in front of the right people without making dance videos or keeping up with the latest trending audio.
“How much hustle do you have to put in before you decide it isn’t worth the grind? There comes a point in every phase of business when you realize that some things simply don’t work—for us, our businesses, and our mental health,” writes
You’re reading this right now, aren’t you? How could that happen if I didn’t post about it on social media?
One of my favorite albums of the last year was introduced to me from an old friend via email.
I wrote about the anniversary of the passing of an old friend in NYC. Their former neighbor found my blog post when they Googled their name. Read that again, friend – they found my blog post. From a search engine. In 2024.
“Lately I’ve been considering leaving (social media) and not looking back, and calling it what it is—an addiction (that’s probably the hardest part as someone who struggles with addiction). It literally adds nothing to my life, other than fleeting moments of “connection” with friends who probably wouldn’t contact me if it weren’t for the 30 second reels,” writes
If you don’t want to go to networking events, or play shows in noisy bars, or set up at busy markets, or start a YouTube channel or a podcast, then don’t. Just because other folks are doing it, doesn’t mean you have to follow their lead.
Set your own path, make your own luck, and if social media makes you sick, start dreaming of a life without it.
The days of posting to social media and a million “things” happening are ending. It was all a house of cards, smoke-and-mirrors.
Yes, there were winners along the way (even today, I know), but the casino has to pay out occasionally, or else people stop visiting.
Writes Kening Zhu in ‘the internet as a creative practice’:
“You cannot truly embody a creative practice in an environment that exploits attention for profit, where you’re pushed to measure your “success” according to metrics of validation. This system encourages that the creative act, not be embodied and lived, but performed and pantomimed.”
I don’t think we set out to optimize, hack, and short-cut our way to more subscribers, shares, likes, and comments.
I wanna run in the woods. You might want to go on more photo walks, or set up a studio, or write a book.
These things take time, so why must our work happen at top speed? What if we slow down, instead?
What does it look like if downshift our efforts and seek deeper connections with just a few great people, more so than growing audience at all costs?
Look at this London Creatives meet up that artist David Speed recently led:
The tech bro pipe dream marketing machine wants us to believe that their platforms are the creative epicenter, but look at that photo above – not an algorithm in sight, just vibes.
What would that look like for you? Maybe not an in-person gathering, but an occasional video call? An accountability group but with postcards instead of daily check-ins? The possibilities are limited only by your imagination
Because look – posting to social media is so easy our parents can do it. Organizing a time and location to meet with other creative folks and share your wins and challenges? Now, that’s hard, and that’s precisely why you should do it.
I know, I know – social media is right there. Just so easy to post. Hit like. RT something.
We’ll just keep hitting those buttons and pulling the levers, along with the 10,000 other artists and musicians and photographers, every minute of every day, around the clock.
“The next post will be a winner, I can feel it!”
Or maybe instead of posting that meme for “everyone,” we share it with one or two people in our contacts list.
Could some of our connections grow deeper if we just made that effort? Instead of “engaging” in another comments thread, what if we sent a DM or email to one or two people this week?
And what if we stopped obsessing over our stats?
There’s always one more goal, metric to measure, and level to reach. Capitalism is about constant growth and the pursuit of more.
Stop looking at your stats and seek good energy instead.
Opportunities can come from the people we already know, the connections we make today, and the relationships we’ve had for decades.
Let’s slow down our desire for more and realize what’s right in front of us.
Nothing lasts forever.
Exhibit A: In the 1970s and early 1980s, my musician parents would play at clubs and resorts in the Poconos several nights a week, making good money playing country rock and blues.
On a recent drive through the area, I saw nothing but decay—most everything from that era boarded up, overgrown, and falling apart.
What happened? That shit is just gone.
Exhibit B: You get linked from a big social media account, and some of their followers will click and see your amazing work.
“If you’re wondering about the ever-increasing clamor to leave social media, my newsletter got linked to on X by an account with 247,000 followers,” said Raziq Rauf in a recent note. It got one click.
What happened? Everyone is posting and screaming for attention, so 1) many people have tuned out, and 2) the social media platforms limit who sees your stuff. Hence, one click.
Exhibit C: Write for a notable outlet. From there, you include that in your “clips” and use that as leverage to write for bigger outlets and build a career.
“So, MTVNews.com no longer exists,” wrote Patrick Hosken on X (here), “eight years of my life are gone without a trace.”
Exhibit C.1: Over 25 years of clips from The Daily Show are wiped out, too.
What happened? This happened with AOL Music’s Spinner.com years ago, too. Once part of the #1 music site in the U.S. back in 2008, it’s all gone. Years of archives weren’t profitable (probably), so they just hit delete and some exec gets a big bonus at the end of the year.
A common theme among all three exhibits is someone else is in control.
It’s not personal, it’s business. Their business.
So what’s our business? How do we work around the inevitable decay in our own creative persuits?
- Are we waiting on a new platform like Cara? If so, can we collect emails on this new platform so we can export them and move on if / when it shuts down or goes sideways?
- What if we start buckling down on our local communities? Are we strengthening our online community with occasional Zoom calls and/or virtual co-work sessions? Phone calls? Can we do this sustainably?
- Are we raising prices? Are we cutting corners or investing in ourselves?
- Does our work require constantly checking our email inboxes? Does that give us life? How could we do this differently? How do we manage the expectations of our availability?
- What if we took all the time we spent making “content” for social media platforms and used it to experiment creatively? “Freed from expectations, what might we make and find?”
I don’t hold the answers. No one does. There is no map.
“If someone needs to understand the way things are, don’t give them a map,” says Seth Godin, “they don’t need directions, they need to see the big picture.”
It’s time we all become enthralled by the big picture, not the analytics.
Let’s stop looking at our stats and fucking email someone.
You know it takes just one email to tank shit, right?
If we get that email from work about being laid off, or we get dumped… one email and boom, our whole life is upended. I got an email recently from my bank and that shit was bummer town.
But it just takes one email to make us jump out of our seats and celebrate.
What if we emailed someone a compliment about their work? Pitched an idea about a project to someone?
We don’t have to wait for these opportunities; we can kick the door down and start making it happen today.
Let’s use our time calmly for a change, without monitoring our output. Making our best work probably doesn’t include punching a time clock.
Get in touch (and keep in touch) with the creative universe right in front of you (and not the open rate metrics from the last 30 days).
Doing all this helps ensure the strength of our creative communities, to withstand the inevitable collapse of the tech bro creator economy complex.
I don’t have the answers to stop the decay, but I bet talking about this stuff freely with other creative folks will help us discover the bigger picture.
Thanks for reading.
In May, I thought of Ezra Caldwell out of the blue, knowing he passed away some time ago. I did an online search, and it was almost 10 years to the day that he left us.
He was someone I met years ago when I lived in NYC. We met via Flickr. I wrote a little something on my blog, and that was it. I didn’t share it, promote it, or send the link to anyone. It was viewed 18 times.
A few days ago a former neighbor of Ezra’s sent me an email. They, too, thought of Ezra recently. They went online like I did, and they found my post.
Their email was sweet, speaking of the time they spent walking their dogs together. They had some of his photo prints in their office (Ezra was a phenomenal photographer).
Friends – believe that magic can happen without social media. Those spontaneous findings and meetings can still take place on the old-fashioned web, as busted and chaotic as it is.
If you’re struggling to leave social media, I get it.
But if it makes you feel bad, if you lose yourself in comparison or grief or anger, or if you just can’t stop losing 4+ hours a day to scrolling… you’ll find your way at some point, just like so many others are figuring it out for themselves.
- “Reclaiming our mental space to be a wide open field for our imagination to flourish instead of a hoarder’s house with piled up boxes full of trending Reel sounds and fit checks,” is how Jak Major describes it in Leaving Instagram.
- “I’m not even sure why I post on Instagram anymore. Perhaps that’s a sign to…not?”
- “Now that Instagram is made up of half advertisements and you see very few posts from people you actually follow, many are calling quits,” writes Marloes De Vries, “people who once spend hours a day crafting content are opting out, and rightfully so. Why spend time in a place that gives you nothing in return?”
There’s no need to wait for some new platform, some online utopia that will bring back the gold-rush of impressions and clicks. It’s a house of cards, an illusion propped up by pitchdecks and advertising potential promised to early stage investors.
No, thanks.
We’re hosting artist meetups, we’re organizing video calls, we’re engaged in our Discord channels, chats, and email threads. There is power in our communities, our creative networks, our neighborhoods, our online hangouts.
Our art and magic will be around long after they shut out the lights at Meta HQ.
Believe that.
Computer-generated “art” is a race to the bottom, and I’m glad we’ve opted out.
Our job is to make what we make with the care of a human mind, drawing upon our experience and talent and passion. Every artist has their own reason, of course.
The consumer has their reasons, too.
Some want the cheapest, so there’s plenty of places to find art made for the everyone, the largest swath of consumers, the safest items you can put in a dentist waiting room, or your kitchen and it won’t upset the inlaws.
Some want the most expensive, the collectors’ pieces, the status that comes with owning a first edition, a rare piece.
Some folks, and I think this is mostly who we serve, care not just about the design but the designer behind it. The art, and the artist who made it. The music, and musician who made the music. The writer who created a whole new world.
It’s a dance to find these people and for them to find you, but it’s a dance worth learning, refining, practicing, and enduring.
It’s not an easy dance, and it’s not a dance where you’re sure to win in the end, but it’s probably the dance we should all be doing because otherwise what’s the point of living?
Social media told us that we’d reach all these people, and for a moment in time, this was true. Every casino has to pay out, or else no one would visit and play. The possibility that we might win keeps us coming back.
But when the casinos puts multiple obstacles in your way before you even get into the building, it’s time to find another game to play.
Is there one answer, one silver bullet, one new app that will return things to normal? No, never. I believe that “centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.”
There’s no one app, service, or medium that will save us all, but we can make this work together (because we’ve been doing it long before the techbros showed up).
Call your friends, book a DIY show, start a flea market, gather some freaks on Zoom or Discord, re-build our scenes from the ground up.
We’re not going back to how it was, we’re building it better.
My friend reminded me how we used to show up at friend’s houses unannounced and crash on couches after a long night of conversation.
Sure, as some of us approach our 50s we’re not gonna do that again, but what’s the new version of that?
What’s the 2024 version of hanging out at the 24 hour diner in town?
You’ve seen people making print zines, right?
Working on websites again and sending newsletters like it’s 2002.
House shows. Thumb drive clubs. Snail mail.
We’re getting back to the simple things with subtle variations, all in our own unique and artistic ways.
I should find more views like this and watch fewer Adam Mosseri videos.
The head of Instagram was explaining why they’re not adding links to post (I removed the video). My friend Dino Corvino is right; who cares?
Instagram and Meta are big corporations doing whatever they want to increase shareholder value. Your local ISP, Netflix and every other service we use (including Substack) will do the same.
My answer? Control what I can control.
I saw too many emails from LinkedIn and scrolled through too many “ways to save the music industry” mega posts than I can put up with.
So, I deleted LinkedIn.
I deleted Twitter last summer.
I deleted Instagram on the first day of 2024.
They’re no longer an option. To make things work, I need to operate within those parameters.
Sometimes, I feel like I need to be up to date with everything happening on social media—the algorithm changes, the new policies, the latest blunders.
But none of that helps you write a better newsletter or figure out how to get new subscribers, so here are some ideas I’ve been batting around this week.
- Be yourself, be consistent, and you’ll find your people. You don’t need to become better or more marketable – you need to be exactly who you are so that people on the same operational frequency can find you. Like Mehret Biruk wrote, “when you put on a mask, you attract the wrong kind of people because they are attracted to the mask and not the you behind the mask.”
- Do it how you want. You don’t need to start a podcast. You don’t need to make videos. You don’t need to sign up for the hot new app. Like David Speed wrote recently in ‘I’m Saying BYE to 100K Instagram Followers,’ “are we going to keep compromising ourselves to cater for an ever-decreasing attention span?”
- Go back to what worked. Okay, social media aside, what else worked? Nic Peterson asks, “can you do it again, remove the parts you didn’t like and double down on the parts you did?” Get away from always having to do the hot new thing, and refine your previous efforts (h/t to Scott Perry).
- Get with people. You can do this virtually or like Jaime Derringer (who founded Design Milk) says, “find an offline way to engage with your community through events, conferences, local meetups, and other non-social media engagements.” This moves beyond what we’ve been doing for so long – shouting our message on social media in hope that someone might hear it. It’s time to get more intentional.
- Slow down. Step away from the online machine and watch what happens. Life goes on. We’re all busy, going about our lives. Post a dozen times a day on social media. Send an email three times a week. Make videos. Start a podcast. What does your art, your business, and your life look like if you slow it all down?
All of the above goes beyond open rates, ideal sending times, and promotions folders shenanigans.
This is about connection in its most basic form.
An email to an art gallery or booking agent, a phone call with an old co-worker, a video call with disgruntled creative folks looking for ways to exist without social media.
All things that the big corps can’t interfere with.
I wrote earlier this year, “Maybe centralized kingdoms of power and influence aren’t the answer.” Stop playing games you don’t want to play, befriend people doing the work you admire, and ascend to a whole new level beyond the social media rat race.
I’ve climbed over 17,000’ since April 19th. This is in preparation for a half-marathon that I’m running in 12 days.
What the hell does this have to do with the Social Media Escape Club?
It’s practice.
It’s why I’m not telling you to delete your social media accounts today.
If you want to live a life without social media stealing hours of your day, start by deleting the app(s) from your phone.
That’s practice (you can reinstall them later if needed).
Try logging out of the accounts on your computer.
Practice (I logged out of LinkedIn today).
Turn off your phone, as Cody Cook-Parrott writes about in ‘Hope and Flowers’:
I know that my ability to earn is directly related to my ability to rest. Not just rest but to turn off the phone, to communicate with less people, and have less screen time. To read, to write, to really be without the phone. To turn the phone off. How many times can I type – phone off. Phone off. No phone. The phone is off. When was the last time you turned your phone off?
NOTE: there’s no need to reply and tell me you can’t do so because you’re caring for someone or you’re waiting for an important call from your doctor—I get it.
Experience being unavailable.
How does it feel when no one can reach you? Maybe journal those feelings. Record some audio of your experience, or a video. You don’t need to share it, but come back to it in a week and reflect.
As you live your life away from social media an hour at a time, you’ll discover that things don’t usually crumble. You don’t disappear.
As you practice being away from social media, you might miss something, so adjust accordingly. If a friend usually DMs you, tell them you’re taking a break tomorrow, and you can be reached via email or text.
If they resist, focus on those who respect your decision not to use services that negatively impact your mental health (I’ve absolutely done this).
Some things you can do in an hour instead of using social media:
- Go for a long walk, bike ride, or sit next to a lake
- Share a meal with a friend
- Read a book or a magazine
- Send a nice email to someone whose work you admire
- Call a friend and discuss art, movies, breakfast recipes, etc.
- Contact someone in your field about working together on a project
- Stare into space, the void, the darkness of time
One of my favorite things to do is take the photos, witty remarks, and hot takes that I used to post on social media and send them to a few friends instead or turn them into a blog post.
The spontaneous bits you’d post on social media can be the source material for your next newsletter, text to a pal, Discord group, or next live Zoom hangout with good people.
Like Professor Pizza of Axe Slasher said in one of our ESCAPE POD hangouts, “why should I give my best material to Twitter?”
I help creative people quit social media, promote their work in sustainable ways, and rethink how a website and newsletter can work together. Find out more here. 🏳️🌈🏳️⚧️
Join us — start a 30 membership and hop on our next Zoom call meeting!
Trying to figure out your email strategy, grow without social media, maybe not sure what to send to people? I’ve got Email Guidance spots open, and here’s how it works and how to book.
Prefer a focused conversation instead? Book a 1:1 call and we’ll dig into your work together.
Email me: seth@socialmediaescape.club
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