No, that title isn't a typo. This isn't a post about why I don't post on social media, quite the opposite really, it came about from me wondering if I should post on social media more.
How Active Am I?
"Not very active" is vague to the point of being unhelpful, so I thought I'd check my three most recent posts, or public shares on my various accounts and record when they were, and what they were about. The breakdown is as follows:
- 15 July 2019: Posted about starting this blog
- 11 October 2018: Changed my cover photo
- 9 November 2017: Changed my profile picture
- 24 July 2019: Posted about starting this blog
- 30 June 2018: Posted a photo from my graduation
- 20 April 2018: Posted a world map for my book (first post on this account)
Twitter (I have Twitter? I'd forgotten about this one until now)
- 6 March 2019: Retweeted an article as part of the job I was doing at the time
- 13 February 2016: Tweeted at a podcast I was listening to
- That's it, only two uses of this account
- 23 November 2019: Posted a homebrew D&D creature for feedback
- 16 November 2019: Asked for advice on whether or not including certain content would be useful to people buying the product
- 13 November 2019: Request for advice on writing in a new and unfamiliar format
This should give you a decent idea of my level of social media interaction, but it could also give you the false impression that I don't spend much time on social media. I promise you that I do, particularly on Instagram as any of my friends can tell you based on the number of posts I share with them via direct messages.
One of These Things is Not Like the Others
While I was doing this recap of my activity, I noticed that I am far more active on Reddit than on any other platform, so I tried to think of why that may be and came up with a few possibilities.
Reddit is anonymous. I have a username, and that's all. People know me by my post history, and other than my interactions there, they don't know me. In a sense, nobody knows that I'm using it, they just know that somebody is using it.
I don't post about myself. Looking at my Reddit post history, it tends to be writing requests, questions about games and how to run them, things I have designed and created, not pictures of me, or places I've been, things I've done, etc. which is I tend to post on Facebook or Instagram (I'm ignoring Twitter, because I genuinely forgot I had a twitter account until I started writing this post).
I use it for something. The difference in my post contents on each platform shows that I consider each one to have a different purpose, and I find it much easier to post when I am trying to accomplish something rather than to post, "just because" which tends to be my view on most social media.
The Life-Lesson
So, knowing what I know about myself, those insights actually helped me to realize a few things about myself, and I hope that by sharing that, I can get you to realize a few things in your own life too, or at least get you to start thinking about it.
What I realized was two-fold; firstly, social media can be incredibly useful, and secondly, I don't post on social media because I don't want people to see me using it.
The first part of that is probably easier to unpack. I have been able to learn all sorts of useful information for writing, publishing, and running games through the communities that exist on Reddit and Instagram, and I have used social media to advertise both this blog in my own time, and other companies as part of numerous marketing jobs I have had in the past. Social media is an incredible tool for learning, advertising, spreading a message, and building a community, all of which are great uses to use it.
The second part is probably more complex. As a teenager I was given many warnings about the negative effects of social media; how it sucked away your time, created insecurities, etc. Somewhere along the line, it seems that in my head I converted the lesson from "Social Media comes with dangers and negatives" to "Using social media is a bad thing". Any use of social media felt like it was narcissistic, looking for attention and validation, or else simply wasting my time. I began to see abstaining from social media as something virtuous, and by extension, saw using social media as something to avoid. It is this mindset that still keeps me from posting publicly on most of my accounts because no matter how much I may use social media, I don't want people to know I use it.
No Good Reason
It's not that the things I'm posting are private or shameful, (they might give away just how much of a nerd I am, but I think the important people are well aware of that already) it is simply that I am posting them, and that feels like something I'm not supposed to do. Why? Because I learned a lesson poorly many years ago, and never bothered to stop and think about it afterwards.
See, I don't apply this standard to anyone else. When I see my friends post on Instagram, I don't think they're attention-seeking narcissists, when a company posts on their community page, I don't think they're wasting time, but I don't permit myself to do these things because I'm convinced that's what people are going to think of me. They aren't, I know they aren't, but somewhere along the way "Not Posting on Social Media" became the equivalent of a personality trait, something that I embraced and decided was part of my identity. I don't know why I did that, probably a combination of environmental factors with too much psychology involved to pick apart here, but it happened, and as a result I have been denying myself the use of an incredible tool, and needlessly restricting myself out of a false sense of virtue which has really been disguised insecurity.
What About You?
I'm trying to change this habit of mine. Running a blog is forcing me to be more active online, and that's helping me break my behaviour of not posting on social media by showing that the "reasons" I had actually don't apply here, but I want to extend these questions that I've been asking of myself to you and invite you to ask them of yourself.
What useful, helpful tools have you been denying yourself access to based on reasons that don't apply, or make no sense when examined simply because you haven't stopped to think about them? What are you not doing, simply because you never have?
I'm not sure if that's going to be epiphany material or just something to chew on, but I guarantee it's a question worth asking. After all, as the old greek put it so well, "The unexamined life is not worth living."
Stay Creative friends,
Michael
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