I’m leaving (most of) social media, and it isn’t a crisis

Goodbye Instagram, Bluesky, Pinterest and Facebook. This is the only place left that interests me.

For about six weeks now, maybe two months, I’ve published an essay every Tuesday and posted alongside it on Instagram, Pinterest, Bluesky and LinkedIn.

The followers have gone up. Not dramatically, but up.

And people have been kind. Likes, comments, shares from people I’ve never met and some that have become incredibly close friends. None of what follows is about them.

This week I sat down to write the next one and didn’t want to. Actually, that’s not accurate. I wrote one about it being “never too late to start something new” which was due to go out this Tuesday. I like the writing, it’s the rest of it I don’t.

Brief pause for context. I’ve always been estranged from social media. Not in a principled way, I just don’t like it. Posting all the time doesn’t appeal to me and never has, and the part I like least is the feeling of asking for attention. Which raises the obvious question, and I’ve been going round it for weeks. If I’m not doing this for attention, what am I doing it for?

It isn’t making me take more photographs. If anything, it’s the opposite. It takes the hours I’d have spent walking around with a camera and spends them somewhere else, and I’ve been telling myself that’s the cost of doing business.

I have a full-time job. It pays the bills.

What I’d rather do with what’s left over is read, finish the novel I haven’t touched in months, and take photographs because I like taking them and I like editing them. Without the bit at the end where I have to hand them over to something.

Then there’s the video question.

Everything I’ve been told and read says the way to be seen on Instagram is reels. And I find it infuriating. I’m not a video person. I don’t shoot video, I don’t document what I’m doing, and I’ve been telling myself for about a year that I’m going to start.

I never do.

To make the thing that works I’d need a hook in the first second, a cut every two seconds, probably something funny, and probably me (from 20 years ago), in it, talking. Every one of those takes time away from the two things I want to be doing, which are taking photographs and writing about them. Moreover, to make the thing that works, means doing a thing I really don’t want to do.

So, I’m going to stop chasing it.

That means Instagram. It also means Bluesky and Pinterest, which is less of a wrench than it sounds, because I never had an account on either until this year. I opened both purely to cross-post, and the whole time it felt like doing an impression of somebody. Facebook I left about ten years ago and never posted on again, so that one’s just admin.

And LinkedIn.

LinkedIn is the one I’ve found hardest, and not for sentimental reasons. It’s felt toxic to me for a long time. The specific thing I object to is that my photography posts have now become a reason for people to email me about buying leads. I put a picture up and it gets read as a sales trigger. I don’t want the two halves of my life touching each other like that. The account stays, because that’s where the day job lives, but I’m done putting photographs there. And I hate that, because I have had people reach out to me and genuinely been interested and happy to see my work.

There are a lot of performative things we’ve agreed we’re supposed to do.

I’m speaking for myself here. Not for anyone else, and I want to be clear about that, because plenty of people love this and plenty more are simply better at it than I am. More natural. Less bothered.

For me, it takes a toll.

You make something. It comes from inside you, through a camera or a brush or a keyboard, and you’re proud of it for a short while. Then you put it out, it doesn’t get the response you thought it might, and you feel like a failure. “It’s the algorithm”, “It’s not the work, you just need to post more reels”.

That isn’t fair. It’s a rigged reading of your own work and I fall for it every time.

I’ve got friends who are artists. Their work is remarkable, and I watch them contort into formats that have nothing to do with what they make, because the platform requires it. Out of their comfort zone, in service of a machine that has no idea what they’ve made, nor cares. That’s the part I find sad.

I wonder about Cartier-Bresson, Elliott Erwitt, Picasso, or Van Gogh, particularly Van Gogh, and whether any of them would rise above the noise now. I don’t know. Nobody does. It’s an unanswerable question.

The tech has failed us. Not at engineering, obviously. At the human bit. Somewhere in the chase for money a person became a data point, and the fact that we’ve accepted this as the price of having our work seen at all is a strange thing to have agreed to. Corporations have limited what people can truly achieve in favour of making as many people follow a pattern as possible and then wrapped it up and presented it to us as an opportunity. And if you pay for the next level up, you “might” get more opportunities. You won’t but that will be because your reels need to be funnier. Hookier. Sellable.

I can’t do it. More to the point, I won’t.

Social media is the furthest thing from social there is.

Which leaves this. And I’m aware Substack has started to look like Instagram and X in places, and I’m not pretending otherwise. But it’s built for writing and reading, and those are the two things I want to do, so it’s the only one left that interests me. Everything else lives on my website.

I’ll be taking photographs with the time I gain. You’ll see some of them here, and on the site, and nowhere else. Follow me, if you like. I’ll try not to care.

Until next week, maybe, probably,

Paul