Social Media Sucks and What To Do About it — A Modest Proposal

Yeah, it’s true. Social media sucks, I guess. I mean, I can enjoy it and spend time with it — but all the criticisms leveled against it — it’s vacuous, shallow, and over-curated, are pretty undeniable.

What’s the solution? Well, you can do what a lot of folks do — announce you’re leaving social media for good because it offends your more delicate sensibilities and you yearn for more real, truer life, delete your accounts from your phone, then, a few months later, silently rejoin.

Or…

You can turn to a solution given to us in the 90’s — the earlier, halcyon days of the popular internet. You could start a blog.

I know, that’s kind of a weird backward sounding solution, but it’s one I wouldn’t imagine getting too much pushback against, on Medium.

A blog is long-form storytelling. It’s storytelling. It’s sharing that doesn’t feel so piecemeal and curated.

Your story is important. Your story is who you are. And telling it, gives people a sense of who you are in a way that pictures of your lunch never will.

If you’re like a lot of people, you have no idea what your story is. You haven’t spent a lot of time thinking about your values and you wouldn’t begin to know what to write in a blog.

Which makes the invention all that more important.

Because a good way to figure out your story or your values is to write about them. Writing is thinking in public. Thinking for an audience (well, not at first, at first nobody will likely read what you write — you have to grow an audience. Which is kind of a blessing really).

Am I trying to revive the blog culture of the 90's? Are Medium, Blogspot, and Livejournal paying me to say this? No. I’m not all that interested in the blog culture, per se. But I do think a culture of stories is vital. It’s how we grow, how we learn, and how we connect. And it’s how we escape the multitude of social media posts about how much social media sucks.

Look, like I said above, it can and does suck. But rather than complain, I’m suggesting doing something about it. If you’re tired of the shallow, argumentative, glossy looks into people’s lives, obviously designed to make them look rich, skinny, and happy, do something about it.

Start telling your real story.