When You Know the Words to Sing - Part I

Why trusting your own voice is such a hard thing to do

(Shutting Down) Other People’s Voices

How much has your screen-time activity switched from fast-paced endless scrolling media, to long-form writing platforms such as Substack?

Maybe we-merry-few, early adopters of Substack are the canaries in the coal mine when it comes to figuring out whether social media is making us sick.

Reputedly, this is the last canary to work down a UK coal mine. Well into the 20th century, coal miners brought canaries into coal mines as an early-warning signal for toxic gases, primarily carbon monoxide. The birds, being more sensitive, would become sick before the miners, who would then have a chance to escape or put on protective respirators. - Wiki

More and more of us are getting strung out by the noise of social media and today the payback isn’t enough to keep us there. Once you’ve seen one reel, you’ve seen ‘em all.

The allure is wearing pretty thin.

The Fireworks Get Bigger Every Year

My long-suffering wife hears this phrase every time we go to some sort of event and we come away as if we’ve just had an assault on the senses. Occasionally, I’ll even say it when looking through all the crisp packets (potato chips) at the supermarket and wondering at what point in a board meeting did someone say… “You know what crisps need? Sugar!”

When I was a kid, fireworks night involved putting a few mini-rockets in empty milk bottles and running around the playing fields firing them around (possibly at) each other in high jinks exuberance. It’s these childhood antics and that giddy sense of excitement and freedom that stays etched in your memory forever.

These days, fireworks night involves standing elbow to elbow with people in a field, corralled behind a cordon, whilst thousands of dollars worth of pyrotechnics burst into nothingness many hundreds of metres away from you.

It’s a ‘witnessing’, not an ‘experiencing’. Do we want to be witnesses to life or do we want to truly live life?

The bigger events are computer-controlled and everything runs to perfection. The visuals are stunning and captivating but when it ends you’re left feeling empty and wondering how long it’ll take the crowds to disperse so you can get back to your car. If you listen closely to your whispers, there’s an unacknowledged lingering sense permeating your body - it’s a sense that says, “I’ve just spent 20mins standing in a dark, damp field with people I don’t know and I’m not sure why?”.

These large group events have a paradoxical effect where the shared experience feels like anything but. Each stranger smiles and Ooohs and ahhhs in a pantomime of enjoyment. All the time retreating into their heads because deep down our bodies know what fun is…and this ain’t it.

This just about sums up the whole social media experience…stunning, captivating, & utterly, utterly boring.

Social Media

Humans being humans, we’ve found ways to hack these soulless platforms. Despite it all, we can and do, find meaningful relationships through our online avatars…but this is despite the design, not because of it.

I can’t help but think we’d give it all up tomorrow if our minds were ever allowed to settle.

A gentle reminder

Shake it Like a Polaroid Picture

Just like gambling machines use random flashing lights and surprise noises, our minds are deliberately not allowed to settle.

This is no coincidence given that the same people who design addictive gambling machines are the same people designing our ‘social’ media experience.

I can again draw on my fireworks analogy…

Fireworks displays have gone from small meaningful moments…watching your father clumsily nail a small catherine wheel to the garden fence, or drawing in the air with a sparkler….to being overawed by million-dollar mega-shows featuring drones, lasers and digital orchestras.

So too, Instagram has gone from sitting with one’s own online polaroid moments circa 2012 to the tsunami of highly-polished, fast-paced, video edits of little to no substance (2023).

It’s all a little too much, too quickly

Breaking the Habit

Maybe you’ve concluded, as I have, that consuming other people’s ideas, without time to savour, let alone digest, is giving you heartburn… perhaps even irritable bowel.

• Have you unplugged from the news? (what passes for news at least)

• Have you heavily culled your social media feeds?

• And are you even saying “No thanks” to courses and workshops that would have previously enticed you?

Maybe you’ve gone back to books? I think if someone invented books today we’d all marvel at how well this technology communicates ideas at a pace tailormade to each user. Sophisticated stuff.

Ultimately your intuition is moving you away from consuming, and back to creating and living life on an experiential level…let it remind you that you’re not some passive voyeur.

Creative Ecosystems

I don’t consider myself creative not in the artistic sense but I do believe all humans are creative in that sense of needing to express who they are.

My wife has encouraged me greatly to see myself as a creative and she has very subtle ways to draw ideas out of me that I didn’t know I had! I guess it comes with her decades of cultivating a creative practice, personally and professionally. She's spent the last few years fine-tuning the balance in sharing her creativity online without being drained by the whole social media circus.

You can of course check out her approach

Claire Venus

if any of this is ringing true for you. Her creative content club course is amazing for engaging with the online world in a way that feels true to your colours.

Our friend and artist Sarah Shots introduced me to the term Creative Ecosystem and you’d do well to pick up a copy of her new book if your creative genius, like mine, needs gently coaxing out of the fathoms-deep fear-of-failure cave.

We got ourselves a reader

Who wants to be an Influencer Anyway?

Influencers get a bad rap, don’t they? But aren’t we all just influencing each other anyway?

Let’s see what the numbers say…

When we think ‘influencer’ we tend to imagine million-plus accounts, but most ‘influencers’ have less than 10 000 followers.

• Around 1.44 Billion total Instagram users

• The biggest following is one user with 500million followers

• Over 80% of Instagram users have less than 10 000 followers

  • Around 35% have less than 1000 followers and

  • 45% have less than 10 000

Never trust a yoga teaching attempting sums but… after removing my socks and counting on fingers and toes, this looks like 1.1 Billion people with less than 10 000 followers.

That’s a lot of influence spread very thinly.

Does that mean we all have more influence than we give ourselves credit for?

I think possibly so.

Does this mean our attention’s dragged across 1.44 billion corners of the internet?

Assuredly so.

We need to get much better at guarding our attention…our focus…our life source.

It’s interesting to me that certain bees ignore bigger and brighter flowers and with their smaller tongues find themselves nourished and better suited to smaller flowers.

If only we had smaller eyes in order to be blind to the swirling mesmerising videos and maybe we'd find our way back to the nectar to be found in the written word and in conversation.