Flasz On Film

I’ve always marveled at the ease with which other people seem to be able to engage with social media. I’ve had accounts on all major social media platforms, but I’ve consistently found it difficult and somehow embarrassing to share pictures of my food, upload photographic evidence of my recent holiday or brag about my life. In fact, I don’t think I’ve taken a selfie more than a handful of times in my life.  

But here I am in a world where if I want to create something, it seemingly is not enough. It’s a requirement that I build and maintain an online persona, engage with complete strangers, build a platform, and share my work. I must become my own brand manager if I want to do anything creative. I must craft a facade of success… and I find it as exhausting as it is futile. Just as I have always refused to optimize my writing for SEO, I could never force myself to seek validation through clicks and likes.  

In fairness, I don’t know how other people do it. I’d scroll through what used to be Twitter or BlueSky and see random folks share their provocative political opinions or humble brag about even their most insignificant accomplishments, and others would just engage. Meanwhile, I’d share a fleeting thought (I somehow believed that Twitter was built for stuff like that actually), a link to something I wrote, or a podcast I recorded, and it’d feel as though I was advertising in the desert. In fact, in recent years, the extent of my social media engagement has strongly resembled the act of trying to attract attention to whatever it is that I’m doing, hoping to increase my discoverability, at a political rally that slowly but surely devolved into a riot. While the world of online discourse became progressively more adversarial, charged and filled with blatant attention-seeking, all I wanted was to point a fellow stranger towards a piece I wrote that they might find interesting if they choose to lend me the ten minutes it takes to read it.  

I can’t be the only one out there who feels as though the current landscape of online content creation was supposed to have come with a manual that somehow ended up lost in the mail. It seems that the entirety of my social media interactions is either a glorified waste of time, a fuel for latent anxiety, or a combination of both. I’d go and read up on this nonsense and come away with tips that don’t work because clearly, I’m always two steps behind the algorithm. The algorithm. What is it, actually? Nobody can tell you what it is and what it does apart from describing it using general statements and circular references. It’s a black box that people lucky enough to have had some positive outcomes with will insist on explaining to you. It’s like soliciting career advice from lottery winners. I don’t know, man. Liquidate your savings and bet on red. That’s what I did and I won. Check out my mansion on Instagram.  

Is it really your mansion, though? Is your Ferrari a rental?  

I’ve never felt the need to post on social media, check for likes, or seek engagement. In fact, every time I did, I’d emerge with elevated cortisol levels in my bloodstream because anonymous people online are somehow prone to conflict. So I stopped engaging. I never felt the need to doomscroll. I’d do it for a few minutes and emerge despairing because apparently other people can get traction and funnel traffic to their work, and I clearly don’t know how to speak algorithmese. And although it’s statistically improbable that I’m the only one out there for whom interactions on social media resemble farting in an abandoned church, it sure feels that way. Or maybe this is, like everything else, a game of reps and time under tension. Maybe what I’m seeing is what happens when you do nothing but post, like and repost, and I miss millions of social media posts like mine because if nobody sees them, they don’t exist.

But I’ll tell you this: I’m tired. Every time I grab my phone and spend even 5 minutes scrolling through social media or engaging with it in any active capacity, I feel like I could have used this time to do literally anything else. I write 1000 words in an hour when I’m in flow state. So, it goes to show that I could write 83 words instead. That’s a paragraph. But apparently, I must carve out time and mental real estate for this activity because I must be my own brand manager, otherwise nobody will know who I am. And here I am telling you that I don’t want to do any of that. In the world governed by attention economics, I’m a self-diagnosed pauper.

I’m sick and tired of handing out flyers at political rallies and posting thoughts into the void. I’ll share links to my work, sure. But I still ask myself why. Online grifters would tell me to build a Reddit presence or find a platform online by sharing my political views, post reels, take photos of my lunch, or split test for engagement and lean into what works. It all sounds disingenuous and tiresome and if you happen to feel the same way, do let me know. I think I’d find solace in knowing that I’m not the only one who refuses to succumb to the cult of the algorithm and cheap dopamine titillation.  

“Is There a Column in This?” is a series in which I stare at one of my intrusive thoughts until I find a way to write 800 words on the matter, if only to prove that it is possible.