So, I Quit "Social Media Content-ing"

Why I Cold Turkey'd “Social Media Content" & How I Avoid the Soggy Wet Brain Blanket of Reactive Creativity

As a creative person, your brain is always on the lookout for what actually matters to you. Because of a phenomenon called “the mere exposure effect”, the more you see something, the more you’ll start to value it. With social media, this means you can spend your valuable creative energy thinking about and making stuff that doesn’t even matter to you.

The big picture: 

It’s no secret that social media has some soul-sucking side effects. 

For every like, share, comment and sparkle-heart-love-eyes emoji we encounter on social media, dopamine is released in our brains. (Dopamine is a feel-good neurotransmitter that’s used to send messages between our neurons, and it’s released when our bodies expect a reward.) 

This is why, despite your best efforts to chill your social media use, your phone is still likely one of the first things you grab when you wake up in the morning, maybe even before you’ve seen sunlight. The siren call of infinite scroll is addictive as hell, and all of the big apps have commandeered our biology to keep us there. 

Now, none of this is new, and, like me, you’ve probably known about this for years.

But it was never enough to actually stop me from showing up online fairly consistently. And it also wasn’t enough to stop me from keeping up with ‘content creation’ (barf), online business, and showing up on all the virtual spaces as a writer & entrepreneur. 

You know how it is – generally playing the game, trying to set limits as I could, and grumbling to myself every time I realized that a mind-numbing scroll spiral had eaten up an hour.

But this past April, something shifted. And it was shockingly apparent just how much my creativity had suffered because of it. 

Zoom In:
When it came to social media, I noticed that I wasn’t just mentally ingesting everyone’s random ideas in my feed – I, a creative at heart, was always doing something with them.

Weighing them, mentally responding to them, and flipping them around in my head – the same way I would with any creative fodder I come across.

Rather than let ideas just exist outside of myself, instead, I was using up precious creative energy reacting to them. Every single time.

If I was lucky, these reactions were just split second moments of opinion: “This jerk is being wilfully ignorant” or “this recipe looks great”, or “I like the way this writer makes reels”. You know, those quickfire responses to whatever pixels are flashing in front of you.

These little opinion-blips are normal and human, but that wasn’t the worst of it.

Because I was giving all of these random ideas free reign to circulate in my mind, my brain interpreted that to mean that they actually mattered to me. (Remember, the mere-exposure effect means that the more you encounter something, the more you’ll start to prefer it, or think it actually matters to you.)

It was like, because I’d continued to spend time scrolling, my brain started to believe that whatever was taking up space in that scroll had value to me.

Said differently, social media was manufacturing the so-called value of ideas in my own mind.

And – here’s the kicker – because my brain thought “these ideas matter!”, it would immediately start cooking up a bunch of creative ideas in response to those ideas. Because that’s what we do with cool stuff that matters. We work with it.

Reactive creativity.

Not because I give a hoot. But because it was there.

Sometimes I’d jot down notes on my phone. My interpretations. How this idea might apply to me (or not!), how this person’s point of view could affect the bigger picture of life or creative business, and more… all because I’ve got a mind that enjoys the puzzle of creativity.

Because I like playing with ideas, taking in inspiration from all over the place, and making new stuff with it all.

And if you’re reading this, I bet you do, too.

Reactive creativity is a term I coined for this frustrating experience, and it happens when you devote creative energy to explore, solve, or investigate themes, topics, or ideas that you actually don’t care about – simply because you’re always exposed to them.

Reactive creativity is what happens when your mind thinks you value something enough to have an opinion – but you don’t.

Zoom Out:
Here’s how I see this happening.

As a creative person, you’re naturally inclined to suss things out. To solve problems. To investigate cool stuff. To take outside information in like the multi-passionate sponge you are, and then twist it about in your noodle and (maybe…hopefully), integrate it into something novel and fresh that has meaning to you.

That’s creative people, on a good day.

Now imagine that every idea you come across online is a duck. And by opening up your app du jour, you’re sitting down by a pond filled with hundreds of ducks.

Reactive creativity works like this:

If I saw an Instagram reel about “The 10 best ways to launch your offer”, I began to notice that my brain didn’t just observe that duck sitting on the water. It didn’t think “hey, there’s a duck!” and then watch it aimlessly drift away.

That would be too easy.

Do I give a flying hot dog about “launching”? Nope. But because so many of the ideas we encounter online are regurgitated themes from other ideas, and ‘launching’ is a biggie out there, my brain started to assume that I actually cared about this idea.

Instead, it would start feeding that idea duck – usually just in my own mind.

Suddenly, this random Instagram post about launching became a puzzle to solve. My creative instincts would kick in, a big ol’ mind map of ideas took shape, and I would immediately start to weigh this person’s ideas in my head.

In this example, the “launching’ duck took the stage:

Is this way of exploring launches a good one? What effect does this focus on launching have on someone’s creativity? Do different types of launches work best for specific creative types? Should I write a post about how I actually REFUSE to launch now, and outline why, in case that’s helpful to people? Are people tired of online launches, and therefore not sharing their ideas because they fear the process of getting that work out there?

…And on and on and on.

Keep in mind – none of these ideas are things I care about. I care about creativity, sure. But launches? Hard pass.

None of these things matter to me, but because thematically they exist often on my social media radar, my brain gave them a seat of honour. And a whole bunch of creative energy went in that direction, instead of towards ideas I actually care about.

I’d just spent five to ten odd minutes noodling on the idea of freakin’ launches.

Gross, right?

I want to reiterate here that none of this is you being awful at social media.

We’re all bad at this, because we’ve evolved to be bad at it. Reactive creativity is just a byproduct of having a curious, creative brain – and that’s a good thing.

But in this online age of social media that’s also a perpetual firehose of ideas that may or may not even matter to you?

It’s worth reminding yourself that your creativity is the driving force of all great things in your life, and it deserves to be protected.

It’s worth remembering that the more you’re exposed to something, the more you’ll get coerced into thinking you care about it – and as a creative, that means it will probably find its way into your work.

The “online dopamine of it all” was always enough to make me leery, but it’s the potential hundreds of hours I’ve spent simply mentally playing with ideas I don’t care about that has immediately, irrevocably snapped me out of the social media vortex.

A friend of mind recently sent me a quote from Georgia O’Keeffe, that has gotten to the heart of it so eloquently:

“I have done nothing all summer but wait for myself to be myself again.”

This has been my summer to reclaim my mind and creativity, and even after just a few short weeks of pulling back from seeing and reacting to online chatter, the difference was noticeable.

Slowly, I could feel the voices, opinions, and ideas of other people drop away – and my own creative values started to rise to the surface again, finally disentangled from the weight of perpetual outside opinions.

From there, I was able to critically filter again, and allow in the content that helps me, while thanks-but-no-thanksing the stuff that just fills me up with zero substance.

Because setting up guardrails against social media isn’t just about protecting your time or productivity.

It’s about protecting your creative values.

There are a million things to care about. There are a million creations to spend your time on, that truly express what matters to you.

Creativity isn’t a game of tennis, where you need to respond to and thwack back every ball that comes your way.

If you’re finding yourself spinning a tapestry with threads that don’t feel like you anymore, it may be time for a reset.

Go Deeper:
If this resonates with you, here are a few thoughts and prompts to explore.

As you notice yourself scrolling social media, ask yourself “Do I truly care about this? Or is it just an interesting problem/distraction that my brain thinks I want to solve?”

If you have a creative business, ask yourself “How would I do this (task) if I didn’t know how anyone else was doing this?” This question can be a game changer for anyone building a creative thing.

Do an inventory: What themes, concepts, or ideas are constantly popping up in your online world? Where are the valleys and ditches that everyone seems to get stuck in? If you need to, set a timer and scroll through your feed for ten minutes and make a list of what keeps coming up. Do you care about these ideas? Do they help you? Do you even want these ideas circulating in your mind & creative fodder?

If not, play with the idea of critical filtering: Purge your feed of the people who share the stuff that isn’t related to what you creatively care about.

It’s not personal, it’s creative self care.