Many years ago, as a baby psychologist, I started to make a little bit of a name for myself by talking to other mental health professionals about using social media for good. It was the early 2000s and while social media was in full swing, therapists and their ilk were not really engaging on social media, at least not using their real names, and almost never in a professional capacity.
Writing that out gives me an appreciation for how people feel when they try to make earlier generations understand that there really was a time when we used Google maps or women having their own credit cards. It feels so paradigmatically different from our current reality as to seem unreal. Said another way, it makes me feel old.
But yes, indeed there was a time long before therapists had a niche on the internet – before they overlaid tips for setting boundaries over videos of themselves doing TikTok dances in their kitchens. And in that before-time, I was writing articles and speaking at professional conferences to let other clinicians and researchers know that there was indeed a place for us online.
The professional community was wary, as they were right to be, about how social media might test the bounds of our delicate relationships with patients. Plus, to that point, most of what practitioners were hearing was about the dangers of social media to our vulnerable patients. I was primarily treating eating disorders then, and my colleagues and I were watching in real-time as the people we cared for were obsessively scrolling pro-ana forums and using their friends’ photos as fuel for their already perilous self-loathing. I watched this in horror, while also suspecting that staying out of the arena wasn’t going to help.
So I stood behind podiums at academic meetings and I taught workshops on how to show up as a therapist online. I talked about how we could maintain our professional ethics by being diligent in the information we disseminated and responding appropriately when a patient makes a friend request. I suggested that we could actually cultivate pro-recovery online spaces and be purveyors of solid and desperately needed information.
It’s been almost 20 years since then, and so the specifics of my tips and tools for therapists would be almost laughable now, though I’m still proud of that body of work. I continue to believe in the power that social media has had to connect people with new ideas, resources, and ways of healing. That’s why I still show up there myself on a daily basis, dedicating substantial time and energy to creating and managing an online presence.
And at the same time, I’m so very over it.
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Talking about being burnt out on social media is hardly a unique angle. Twenty minutes into any social gathering will probably find some conversation on the topic happening. We talk about our own changing habits. We talk about keeping our kids safe from it. We talk about who has quit social media, and those exotic folk who never got on it. No longer a place where discussion happens, it’s become much more often the topic of discussion.
And while analysis of its dynamics and perils have been happening since its inception. I’m feeling the pace of the conversation quickening. There is an undeniable shifting tide, and data is bearing it out. According to the Morning Consult, 61% of U.S. adults reported being more selective about what they post on social media these days. People cite privacy concerns, toxicity, and the act of sharing just being less fun as reasons they are putting less of themselves out there. For some it’s a conscious choice, while for others they’ve noticed their habits beginning to change.
On my personal pages, I’ve been more in the latter group. As fewer of the people I have active interest in share glimpses of their lives or musings online, there’s less and less there to capture my already under-resourced attention. In the absence of interesting friend updates, what’s left is mostly a disorganized pile of marketing campaigns, buy-nothing groups for neighborhoods I no longer live in, and vaguely sexual photos from the young adult children of friends. It’s like being at a party and looking around and realizing I should have left 45 minutes ago.
I rarely post on my personal accounts anymore, but I’ve continued to be active on my professional ones – specifically Instagram. In the midst of the changing social media landscape, that page still felt like a meaningful little corner, a forum for the ideas that burn a hole in my brain. It’s been a space I could curate in the best sense of that word – somewhere to offer parts of my own experience from a personal and professional lens that seemed to connect with parts of others.
But lately, as the landscape keeps shifting and as I keep shifting, I’m struggling to decide whether the rewards of that space outweigh the costs. And I’m noticing that this calculation isn’t confined to this question of whether or how to be on social media. It feels bigger than that.
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My professional account doesn’t have a huge following by any of today’s standards of what is influential, but it’s done some growing over the past several years. There’s an unwitting paradox to being online as a business or professional – or maybe even just as a person – which is that you want your reach to be big enough. If you’re a creator of any sort, “enough” is inherently defined by the goals of your work. If you’re a writer, you want to have enough followers that people are reading your stuff. If you’re a plumber, you want to have enough people be aware of your services that your phone keeps ringing.
But of course, enough is rarely objective and always a moving target. Some of those people will have long since disengaged with your account, even if they’re still technically followers. Then there are the dreaded algorithms, of course, which mean that you might have a bajillion followers but Meta doesn’t like you and you’re wasting your time.
Finally, your drive for more visibility can easily become a function of your own ego or scarcity without even realizing it.
All of that to say, the whole follower count issue is a weird one to begin with. And what I have noticed as my own count has crept up is that I enjoy the space less. I’ve spent an embarrassing amount of time out of my walks considering the reasons for this. There’s a part of me that hates that idea that social media gets my attention not just while I’m scrolling, but also while I’m strolling (couldn’t help myself with that one). But it’s where a lot of my life has existed to this point, so I suppose it makes sense.
What I’ve come up with as the core drivers of my own growing ick divides into my experience as a consumer and as a producer on social media. The themes overlap, but let’s talk about them separately for a moment.
As a consumer on social media, my growing distaste feels like a function of basic fatigue. After multiple decades of letting my attention be manhandled by algorithms written by guys I wouldn’t even want at my birthday party, my brain is just tired.
The neuroscience of this has been well-established, but it really boils down the basic fact that our brains were simply not meant to process this much data. An analysis a few years ago estimated that the average human is intaking 74 gigabytes of information every day, roughly the equivalent of the content of 16 movies. This was more bits of information that humans 500 years ago would take in during an entire lifetime and we’re doing it every single day. Frighteningly, this is increasing by about 5% every year.
All of that information would be mind-numbing even if the content was unique or gratifying, but the vast majority of what I find myself consuming is essentially 18 variations on the same theme. And beyond that, the perpetual stream of information creates this sense of always needing to do something. Sometimes, sure, it’s just to laugh. But more often than I’d like, I feel these tiny, subtle urges to act. In the span of six minutes online, I’ll have decided I need to get my hormones checked, try out a new gentle parenting strategy, visit a new restaurant downtown, buy a fire extinguisher, run for my local school board, and buy a jade roller. I’ve written before about how to sort through all the noise online as a parent, but it’s getting to the point that being a mindful media consumer feels like an oxymoron.
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If I were only a consumer on social media, I imagine I’d find it easier to disengage. But as someone who has been creating content – first on blogs, then on social – for the last twenty years, ceasing to produce online feels like a weighty decision. And yet, the idea of moving away from it has been tugging at me in a way I can’t ignore.
What I haven’t been able to shake is the way in which being online – meaning, having an online presence – shapes my offline time as well. The more time I spend online, the more my mind unravels in a thousand different spools of thread. Each post I read by another creator sparks a thought, an idea, a way of thinking about something. It’s like those jade rollers, but in the realm of information. I want to dig into those ideas and to write about them too. And that wouldn’t inherently be a bad thing, except that it’s all just too much. I find myself holding hundreds of threads that I’m so overwhelmed by that I never start weaving.
And then there’s the heart of what’s nagging at me, what may actually pull me away: how uncomfortable it’s gotten to be so constantly perceived. Now, I’m certainly not suggesting that this is something being done to me. I’ve very consciously chosen to share aspects of myself online. There’s the reality that those of us who are millennials were essentially groomed for this, but nonetheless, I’ve curated an online self – and lately that’s felt increasingly disquieting.
It goes back, in part, to that increasing follower count. When my online community was smaller, sharing more intimately felt scary at times, but also meaningful and connecting. I’d find myself excited to see more people engaging with what I was sharing, but at the same time less safe and free to do so. I’ve been incredibly fortunate to be spared much vitriol over the years, and yet as much work as I could do on myself to inoculate myself, it’s never stopped being hard to digest unkind comments.
If, as they say, we don’t really see people as they are, but as we are… well, it gets wearisome to be on the end of all of those projections. As Anne Helen Petersen recently shared in a brilliant piece on the topic of people posting less online, “You become a natural target for others’ unprocessed guilt, ambivalence, and confusion.” Again, my own online presence is hardly big enough to claim that I’m a consistent target, but I think this applies at any scale. Whether we are posting in the neighborhood moms’ group or to our global audience, sharing ourselves online opens us more widely to the assumptions and projections of others.
All of that being perceived really isn’t good for us, to state what should be obvious but maybe isn’t anymore. I was thinking about this when I was reminded of Dunbar’s number the other day. This is a principle based on anthropological data that suggests that humans can maintain stable relationships with about 150 people max. Scientists think that this was about the average tribal size, and what our brains are cognitively capable of managing. If we are built to account for the emotions, reactions, and interactions of about 150 people (and never all at once), it’s no wonder that a flood of attention – even when mostly positive – is overstimulating and disorienting.
I feel this in my body lately when I post online. Whereas I used to hit send on my post and spend a few minutes hoping that it picked up some traction, I notice lately that I find myself worrying that it might. Because if an idea or belief or emotion of mine is out there circulating, that means the chances of being projected upon are growing. It means I’m being perceived – or misperceived.
As I write this, I have the feeling that it all might sound far more dramatic than I intend it to. I do have a core enough sense of self to tolerate the projections of others. But I’m wondering if many of us are coming up against the limit of how often we need or want to tolerate them. We were wired to do it on a smaller scale. We weren’t built for thousands of strangers perceiving us so regularly.
I read a recent study about what happens to human consciousness and social perception when we are under surveillance. When humans are aware of being watched, they become hyper-vigilant and potentially mentally preoccupied. While I’m not suggesting that posting online periodically is the same as being surveilled, I think the perceptual experience has some overlap.
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The tidy conclusion to all of this feels like it should either be a proclamation of quitting social media or a how-to on being online authentically and healthfully. Maybe I’ll have one of those two to offer in the future, but for now, I’m just laying out the experience. Because as I said earlier, my sense is that there’s something here for us that transcends the questions of whether to be on Facebook or Instagram or even how to use them.
One thing that’s here for me is the way in which our bodies will always tell us when something isn’t working. The agitation of the information overload, the pit in the stomach when vulnerability is too much, the hollowness of hanging in pallid online spaces. If we notice and give credence to the subtle shifts in our bodies, they will signal us. They might not tell us explicitly what to do, but they offer us the data – the kind that can’t be sold to marketing firms.
And the other thing that feels relevant, even offline, is the realization that we don’t actually need big communities. The whole concept of “followers” is actually really weird, when I think about it. We’ve spent so much of the 20th and 21st centuries focused on the idea of success as expanding our individual reach, when in fact it’s so antithetical to how humans are built and how meaning is made. We haven’t evolved for so many eyes on us, and our power will really come from having an impact on those closest to us. Not from a viral video that no one will remember in 48 hours.
It’s easy to forget these things with Instagram whispering in our ear, which is, at minimum, a call to spend more time offline. The party, I think, is winding down.
