I’m officially in “Not My Business” Season, for which I owe a debt of thanks to Olivia Rafferty for describing how I’ve been feeling most of this year.

This isn’t just for Substack authors- it’s for every creative person.

Social media made us believe we must become graphic designers, video editors, sound engineers, interview hosts, SEO experts, copywriters, and about a dozen other things in addition to the thing we do.

Experts will have you believe that if you tweak your About page a little bit more, focus on SEO, or make better thumbnails, then success is just around the corner!

Not my business.

Sure, there are some “best practices,” but the bar is low (ahem, a website and an email list). We’re not here to chase lowest common denominator tactics, we’re here to shift culture and change the world, right?

• Imagine spending more time on things that rejuvenate your soul instead of cosplaying as an overworked social media manager.
• Instead of learning how to navigate all the new features that Meta has set up on Instagram, imagine becoming a better musician, photographer, or artist.
• Spend most of our non-day job hours honing our craft rather than becoming part-time “content creators” while expecting full-time results.
• There’s a screen time app, but where’s the guitar time app, or painting time app? Imagine if we tracked our creative practice and saw that we spent three hours a day writing. We’d celebrate that, wouldn’t we?

We don’t need more subscribers; we need more heartbreak, laughter, and / or deep metaphysical talks about the afterlife in cemeteries on rainy evenings.

That’s the business I want.

Let’s stop worrying about growing our audience. Open your contacts app and reconnect with the people who came into your life but you stopped talking to because you felt just posting on social media was enough.

Get in the business of building connections instead of shouting.

We’re talking about art here, people. We’re not selling USB cables or homeowner insurance, we’re channeling the divine, spending time in the fog, smelling the flowers, jumping in puddles, and walking around museums.

That’s our business.

If you get people to your website, do your best to keep them there. If you’ve got a new video or song to promote, embed it on your own website and link to it from your newsletter and social media.

Direct people where it’ll have the biggest impact – SALES.

Add the piece of multimedia to your site, where you control the branding and layout. Optimize and make it easier for people to pre-order your new product or service, or even to just find out more about YOU.

Because sending to people to YouTube just keeps people on YouTube, which benefits YouTube.

Sending people to Spotify or Apple Music keeps them in the streaming music world.

Get people to your site, give them a reason to stick around, and don’t let that attention go to waste.

Years ago, when I ran Noisecreep for AOL Music, we had the Deftones in for a studio interview.

My pal Gino DePinto took the photo below.

To set the mood, he brought along his CD boombox and put on the band’s debut album ‘Adrenaline’ (yes, this was before Spotify even rolled out in the U.S.).

After the shoot, vocalist Chino Moreno walked past the boombox and pretended to remove the CD and fling it away.

Nobody likes their early stuff, it seems.

What’s this got to do with you setting up a website for your work?

You probably still haven’t set up a website because you’re sure it won’t get 1,000 clicks a day (so what’s the point?), and getting 23 likes on Instagram is just easier (and makes Zuckerberg rich).

Better to skip the whole website thing until you’ve really made it.

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Now, I thought of putting together a list of 20 creative folks with their cool websites, but that’s like me putting together a list of 20 photographers and saying, “here, make your photos look like this.”

You’re the artist here, right? The writer? The poet? The instructor? The musician?

Years ago you closed your eyes and imagined your magic in the world.

You’ve created your artistic vision from nothing but imagination, refining your taste and becoming more comfortable with your creative output over the years. Decades.

Now, do that for your website.

Buy a domain at Hover (affiliate link), and try something fancy like Squarespace, Cargo, or Wix.

Just log in, make a free account, and mess around!

Try something weird like Straw. Make a simple one-page site with Carrd. Publish a Google Doc (or Slides) to the web, or a Miro board.

Grab some friends, learn some HTML, and upload your site to site44, Yay.boo or GitHub Pages.

Get together with a friend and build a website! COLLABORATE! Maybe hire or barter with someone to make it?!

Experiment! Play! Try things (you know, just like your art)!

Fill it with your bio, ideas, and videos. Include your wins, press hits, and the nice things people say about you.

“We post all our most interesting photos (on social media), the imagery that shows off our unique, creative spirit, the videos that capture our spontaneous, magical energy.

We won’t put any of those cool images on our website, then we complain that nobody goes to our website.”

You can still post all your work to YouTube and Spotify of course, for the D i S c O v E r Y, but once you have a direct connection with your fans, you can stop sending them to the food court at the mall – a world filled with distractions, cheap snacks, and flashing lights.

“When you drive someone to YOUR site, you control the branding, the vibe, the links, the experience.

When you drive someone to YouTube, your video is now competing with content that is algorithmically alluring to your fan!”

It’s standard practice to send out email newsletters with prominent links to watch videos on TikTok or YouTube, destinations owned by corporations that aim to show as many ads as possible.

They are optimized for this lone purpose, making sure your measly text link in the description or bio is obfuscated, as these companies don’t benefit when sending your fans to anything off-site.

Put your magical, delightful items on your own website. Let people discover you in a space that is purely your own, without hammering yourself into profile pages that just don’t fit right.

Is setting up a website easy? Heck no, but the art and magic you create isn’t easy either, and I believe that if you’ve come this far the hardest part of that equation is already done.

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 

Jamie R Cox in ‘Am I The Girl Who Deleted Instagram?’

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 

Kaitlyn Ramsay

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.

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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.