Writing is reciprocal but this is not 

I had an epiphany recently: the news feed is all noise. I’ve been confusing it for influence, ideas, and insight, but I am getting nothing from it, and neither are you. 

Social media is a game. As anybody who had a half-successful account on anything before understands, it’s actually not that hard to reach the mild heights of what an ordinary person needs:[1] unless you’re already rich, hot, and in-tune with the zeitgeist you’re not going to become Addison Rae or Kardashian famous, but clout? Actually pretty easy to come by. Do simple things: check your analytics, post regularly, refine your style, and sell what you have already, and you can easily become somebody desired by a faceless horde of somebody elses. It’s intoxicating, and feels reciprocal: when people praise you for just being yourself, you feel like they’re your friend. Putting more effort into being a more concentrated form of yourself feels contrived, yes, but in an authentic way – like choosing the songs to go on a mixtape or an outfit for a job interview, you remain yourself but presented in a specific light to appeal to specific people. You develop relationships, and even believe the image of your best self presented to the world is real, 3-dimensional, and warts-and-all. 

Social media is a trap. To get anywhere with it requires time – a lot of time – and the sale of your life to strangers. The moment you – or anybody you know – do anything even remotely interesting, you need to get it on your feed. Quiet dinner out with your spouse? Celebrating a friend’s achievement? Party? They all become about you in some way, the lens being used to commodify your appearance and connections and spending habits for strangers’ consumption. I used to carry around three books minimum at any one time, because if I so much as walked past an attractive garden I had to steal the idea of their flowers and photograph it. I might have only been posting once daily, but I was queuing up posts always, and because interesting things tend to come together (date night is the meal, the outfit, the taxi, the drinks, the outside of the restaurant) one day could become the main body of my week’s content. Content creation is very much a job, not a hobby, and as it bleeds into your personal life it becomes less art and more contrivance, less lifestyle aspiration and more annoyance to those around you who are drafted in to the labour of waiting whilst you photograph their meal, photographing you, sighing when you’re late. The trap of social media is that it’s myopic or it’s voyeuristic: you do not know these people, and everything is not about you, but in order for it to work, that becomes the social contract – and, of course, sometimes it works! My Plath community was built online, and I have had friends bleed to-and-fro through the porous membrane of my life online and my ‘real’ life. There are benefits, or we would simply leave in droves. 

I want to like Substack. I want to read articles by writers, undiscovered or successful; I want long reads and to expand my horizons and to learn… but is interacting with people helping that? Is growing my endless cache of books I think might be neat really growth?[2] I have once again – albeit on my own terms – tried to play the game of the algorithm but fallen into the trap of social media, trying to share intimate moments of my life in service of growing my audience, and to what end? 

The only person who’s commented on any of my articles in all the time I’ve posted has been somebody I know IRL excited about a band we both like. My most recent follower got my account from a poster at my library, not through finding my work organically in the wild. Social media is not our friend, and perhaps some people may find an income or a following from Substack, but I personally (like many of us, I suspect) am screaming into the void.[3] I had an epiphany recently that whilst writing may be reciprocal, this is not. Even social media curated for reading, writing (and ‘rithmatic?) is all noise. I’ve been confusing it for influence, ideas, and insight, for years but I am getting nothing from it, and neither are you. 

I have been and am on both sides of ‘content’: I am both imbibing and creating constantly, and I want to ask, what, and for what? If the answer is ‘growth’ then the only growth I can honestly do is to grow the fuck up: we only get finite time, and is the growth I want to do based on pithy witticisms, adding things to an endless list I can barely whittle down? I can believe that growth is in all directions whilst acknowledging that the most powerful growth will be directed. I myself have to choose where ‘forward’ is, because in the modern world the current of information could wash over us. We are forever able to find something that makes us go ‘huh, neat’ but will never grow into an expert without self-directed effort, and that is what I want to do now. I want to direct my time and remove this superfluous noise from my life. 

I want to grow from curated spaces. I can ask social media to point the way for me (it’s great, for example, at showing me how I can decolonise my reading) but if I want the reciprocity people tell us can come from writing and reading – the opening of the mind, the appreciation of art, the powerful dialectic that comes of being a writer and a reader simultaneously – I have to acknowledge that Substack is not where I will grow. I will grow from reading your books, or the books you share, but the space itself is a waste of my time. I grow more from the practice of my craft, writing nothings to nobody, than I do reading the half-formed musings that barely prompt my own thinking. I grow more into what and who I want to be when I model myself on the people I admire than I do paying attention to peers in the content mines, and I daresay the same is true of you reading this. 

My own main source of growth – growth in the algorithmic sense, growth in the sense of who is reading this on Substack not WordPress and how many of you all there are – is my notes, the social media feed. It is piecemeal, pathetic growth. It is sporadic, unpredictable, and not worth stressing over, especially not when compared to the development my thinking and prose might do were I not self-promoting, trying to be heard in this cacophony. I do not want to be heard because I am loud, I want to be heard because I am resonant, heartfelt, honest, well-crafted. Success, to me, is respect, not widespread impact: respect, then, should be the currency that improves me. I should be driven to engage with that which I respect in the hopes of embodying aspects of it all. I appreciate you WordPress readers for googling something that got you here, and for sticking around, but this does echo social media somewhat.

This is all noise. I want quiet contemplation. 

[1] from my humble beginnings as a weird kid lying on myspace to my brief stint as a bookstagrammer when I was looking for meaning and control, I have flirted with growing my profile online before. If I’d kept at posting those IG reels everybody loved where I was lip syncing on the bus I could probably have a few thousand tiktok followers and a thriving instagram community by now. Instead, you may notice, my accounts are scrubbed and I feel very Fiona Apple about it all. 

[2] I am not joking, if I read 4 books a month for the rest of my projected lifespan I am only halfway through one of my TBRs (the one I keep on StoryGraph). I could read a book a day and never finish everything I want to read. 

[3] in my case, this is no skin off my back, since I would be posting to my blog / personal website lateromantic.com anyway – as you know, since you are here! The archive of stuff here goes back to 2015, and the weekly posts back to 2021. 

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On This Topic: 

• The accounts doing the hard part of decolonisation for me include Kayla Love, whose book I have pre-ordered, 
• Afro Reads, who share a decolonised bookshelf with a breadth that will appeal to everyone, 
• And Ayan Artan, who I think might just be intelligent tbh. 

To-Do: 

• Add awards shows to my DEI calendar. It is a living document and a thing to behold, following multiple countries and commemorating and celebrating everything I can think of. 
• Finish Mitfords comic book. It’s close to being a DNF but I’m going to a Mitfords event this month and I really would like to be able to join in discussions about the new book. 
• Write back to RS and others. 

Today’s Culture: 

• I switched to my husband’s apple watch to monitor my sleep and try to remove the phone from my life. It’s not the worst choice I’ve made, but I don’t want to say it’s working yet. 
• I’ve been reorganising all my wishlists and hoping that will scratch the shopping itch. Consuming less is on the list I made of things that would make me happy. 
• Just because one writes nonsense doesn’t mean one gets nothing out of it – writing is how I think: I come to the page with a half-thought or flash of an idea and I leave with a more solid understanding of myself and my worldview. I hope my writing brings that to you, too.