A Month off Social Media
I was at a friend’s house on new year’s eve and a handful of us were sitting around in the early evening while our kids bounced maniacally on a trampoline filled with pillows outside. The group naturally slipped into some reflections on the past year and it occurred to me that while I felt the urge to reflect and to think about the coming year, I could barely summon a single thought from my withered little brain.
One of the people there was Kimberly Andrews - a talented illustrator, author, business owner at Tumbleweed Tees with her husband, James, and a great one for deep-dive chats about ideas and the creative life. She was telling me about a newsletter titled ‘Is Instagram holding me back?’ by artist/author Marloes De Vries and before we knew it, we were both deleting our Instagram apps right there and then. No fanfare, no big explanation, just gone in an instant. For something that seemed to play an annoyingly large role in my day-to-day life as a photographer, it was surprisingly easy and freeing to hit that little x and make it go away.
2023 Burnout
The six months leading up to that moment had been intense and exhausting, which is probably why I was so ready to hit the eject button. My clever wife had taken a new job at her dream organisation, but still needed to run her own thriving business before and after work each day. This meant that I went from bouncing between photo shoots and editing, music teaching, recording sessions and shows with my bands (I’m also a musician), plus shared parenting duties for our two daughters, to essentially doing all of that as a solo parent while she worked endlessly.
I was toast. We were toast.
Summer Reset
We stayed home over the summer to recoup and only really went as far as the local pool or beach a block from our house via the ice cream shop. I’ve noticed over the years that whenever I hit the wall, I tend to gravitate toward making things. Physical things. Working with my hands. This summer I got a stack of plywood and built some custom shelving in my daughters’ bedrooms in an attempt to better use the limited space we have and offset the rising tide of Barbie accessories. I find that building things has an inherent slowness to it (painfully slow in my case). It makes for a nice change of pace from modern digital life and it can be a satisfying portal back to the real world.
As I swam, walked and built my way through January, I gradually started to feel more settled and noticed the feeling of having time return in a moment-to-moment sense - despite having almost no time to myself. The people I thought about the most were the ones I saw in real life, not the ones who posted the most. I thought about my own work and what I wanted to make without the constant intake of my peers’ work. It was noticeably good and after a few weeks I stopped thinking about social media completely. It was liberating to lose the feeling of needing to check my phone, of needing to get back to something. I also found it refreshing to get away from the constant (and hilarious) bombardment of memes, reels and satire.
A Fresh Start (with some tweaks)
I’m writing this over a coffee at my kitchen bench after taking my kids back to school. It’s my first taste of silence in about six weeks and I need a new, sustainable plan for the year. I envy people who don’t need to use social media for their work. Most of my work comes from it, so I can’t stay off it entirely. But I’m clearly more of a caveman with a camera than a millennial digital-wizard, so as I ease back in I’ll be doubling down on the phone rules I set last year after listening to Cal Newport’s ‘Digital Minimalism’ and ‘Deep Work’ in an attempt to avoid the traps.
Why So Many Words? Why?
I enjoy writing as well as taking photos, it’s a great way to make sense of things. So having a blog and newsletter will be a good chance to take stock of my thoughts, to give some more depth to the work I’m doing and what’s inspiring me at more sustainable pace than the rapid-fire speed of social media. I don’t really have a plan here, I’m just going where my energy and curiosity leads me. My blog posts probably won’t all be this wordy, they’ll be more of a gallery with some accompanying thoughts.
Looking Ahead
There’s a natural seasonality to creative work and projects that I want to lean into more in this year and I think this way of communicating will help. I have some exciting things on the horizon that I’ll share in time through blog posts, my newsletter and Instagram. The newsletter will be the only way to guarantee you see these things because there’s no algorithm suppressing the reach, but, you know, do as you please.
Finally, the thing I enjoy most about this work is the collaboration with clever and interesting people - like the aforementioned James and Kim. Kicking around ideas over coffee and making new things that feel exciting and authentic. Here’s to more of that in 2024.
Images shot around my neighbourhood over summer.