Post-July, when I annually take a break from social media (last yr was a full-on sabbatical), I almost always think: It's interesting how places like Twitter have convinced us that our job is to drop witty, pitty, emotion-provoking thought bombs instead of longform, deep work.

On the surface, it's a benign—and even good—thing to want to connect with each other. But when it replaces our creation of meaningful work that matters, sucking our creative energy to it instead of the things we really care about, it stops being a neutral tool & becomes a burden.

Practically-speaking, if I deeply care about writing books that matter, inventing made-up worlds that help us live in our real world w/ more beauty, then places like Twitter & Instagram better take up 1% of my work time, with the 99% going to actually doing the work that matters.

I see far, far too many talented people sucked into the vortex of Instagram's prettiness and convenience and have convinced themselves that it's worth it to exchange their creativity for algorithms that use their photos and ideas as marketable data. They've been had.

I'm betting that a hundred years from now, we'll have moved on from places like Twitter & Instagram. But we'll still be reading books, listening to music, & painting. We'll still crave stories that point us to truth, beauty, & goodness.

We might have some newfangled social media replacement — in fact, human nature tells me I'm sure we will — but if we care NOW about work that lasts till then, that's the stuff we should focus on today.

As a little postscript, my friend @sethhaines (who's taking off August from social media) is currently writing a really good series on what social media is doing to our minds, creativity, & community structures. This was a bombshell: http://www.sethhaines.com/blog/2020/8/4/if-i-only-i-could-make-you-angry-or-afraid-how-to-win-followers-and-influence-people

Here's the whole series, actually: http://www.sethhaines.com/blog/tag/Influencers

And ugh to Twitter's lack of an edit button. Pitty = pithy; remove the comma between longform and deep work.