Blog / 2024 / What It’s Like When You’re Not on Social Media (An Artist’s Perspective)

It’s been four years and a day since I quit Facebook and Instagram. In that time, I’ve learned a lot about myself and even more about social media. Here are the four main lessons:

People who are into Instagram don’t tend to look anywhere else.

Often they’re overwhelmed with keeping up with their feeds, and they don’t have the bandwidth to search for much information or conversation outside of their preferred apps. This means that, if you’re not on TikTok, you’re at least a little invisible to many of the people around you.

I know this seems like one of those just-the-way-things-are kind of things, but the emphasis on in-app social interactions is bizarre, unhealthy, and also exactly how the social media companies want it to be. They’re pouring all kinds of money into making their platforms addictive, and that effort has not been wasted. It’s why we, as a society, need to fight for financial control of our information. We need to force these companies to pay us some of the money they make from selling ad-targeting services to other businesses. This payment could easily take the form of a universal basic income, allowing each of us a bit more freedom in a world where these corporations have stolen so much of it by hypnotizing us in such a devastatingly targeted manner to get us to buy more and more stuff.

The best thing you get from TikTok is validation.

Some might argue that Instagram’s appeal is in the networking, but the thing I miss most after twelve years on Facebook and four years without is the way it provides an instant dose of you’re-on-the-right-track. The metrics of success—the “likes,” the views, and the follows—all fill a deep social need we humans have. And they’re especially appealing to artists, who are forever being told by a society obsessed with money as the only true measure for goodness that their choice to pursue art instead of a steady paycheck is wrong.

The worst thing about Facebook is also the validation.

When you turn to TikTok for acknowledgement from your community that what you do matters, you’re accepting a kind of affirmation that’s been averaged. What I mean is that it’s not a person who’s thanking you for your contribution, but a people, and the power of that group response can make you want to play to your audience. In creating art that you know will garner you positive feedback from a whole crowd of art lovers at once, you fall into the worst kind of people pleasing, which is a trap that any artist who wants to make money with their art is already going to have a hard time avoiding.

Social media makes you lose your ambition to be yourself.

This is a wider problem, of course. It’s not only social media that’s narrowing our ideas about what we can do with our lives. We, as a society, have a tendency to cramp each other’s individual style—I alluded to this in #2 when I talked about our obsession with money, but there’s more to it. We’re constantly pressuring each other to check all the boxes on The List of Rightness. You have to:

(✔) get the proper job
(✔) make the right money
(✔) buy the correct car
(✔) find the right spouse
(✔) purchase the best home
(✔) produce 2.5 children
(✔) raise your kids to get a proper job

There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with these life choices and I don’t mean to shame anyone who’s made them. Rather, as someone who’s spent their life being shamed for not making these choices, I’m making a case for a different way of being. I want a world where not following the prescribed path is okay. I want each of us to feel encouraged to take the time to figure out something beyond The List that makes sense.

I want to live on a planet where everyone’s main ambition is always to be themselves.

And social media is an enemy to that sort of existence, because TikTok, Instagram, and all the rest foster conformity. (See above in #3.)

The idea of championing the ambition to be yourself is inspired by two artists: Naomi Kanakia and Sanchia Marshall.

A few months ago, Sanchia and I were chatting about how neither of us enjoy looking in the mirror—in my case, it had been years since I’d taken in my face as a whole instead of simply scanning for blemishes. Then Sanchia told me the story of asking her teenage daughter what she saw when she looked in the mirror. The adolescent’s response was iconic:

“A magnificent beast.”

I decided that I’d very much like to see that as well, so I set to work making a self-portrait in the mirror, and that’s what this video shows. Watching it, I find it shocking to see how much the painting shifts during the process. My mood and my ever-changing comfort level with making eye contact with myself influenced the magnificence of the beast I was looking at.

A week or so after finishing this mirror exercise, I happened to pick up Naomi Kanakia’s book Just Happy to Be Here, a YA novel about a first generation American trans girl who goes to a storied and self-important DC college prep school where she’s pressured to have big dreams about becoming a senator or some such thing, while she and her friends are just trying to figure out how to be themselves.

The story completely stressed me out, but it also touched me in that way that only YA can. It reminded me of the intensity of adolescence, and it made me want to have a teenage rebellion at age 43.

Our society and our socially oriented brains are constantly try to trick us into being like everyone else. I’d never thought of doing the opposite as being ambitious until I read Naomi’s book, but I quite like the poetry of it.