What kind of story is social media for?
On May 23, 2019, I posted to Instagram for the last time. It was misty shot of the Flatirons in Boulder, outside the cabin where I had decamped from SF a few months before. A year before that, I logged off Facebook. Though I founded and built a company a stone's throw from Twitter's first office in South Park SF when microblogging was twinkle in the eye of the bearded one, it never got its hooks into me. I visited YouTube only when my lawn sprinklers refused to sprinkle or to catch glimpses of Martijn Doolaard's cabin poetry in the Italian Alps.
Why forsake social media? To paraphrase Hamlet, something was rotten in the state of the Internet—and it was dawning on me that I had helped to make it so. The company I had built and sold made marketing automation software. In other words, we made it much easier to pelt users with messages of every kind to "engage" them based on their behavior.
The exit was a financial success, but it left me feeling dead inside. The engagement loops that my company had helped to normalize made us all much more engaged online—at the cost of engaging in our real lives.
With no company to run, I took a hard look at my own life and realized I had only ever given myself permission to do what I thought other people would want. I literally looked in the mirror one morning and read the white letters printed on the black t-shirt that YCombinator gave its founders: "Make something people want."
I sat at my kitchen table looking at the misty Flatirons and cried into my oatmeal. Yes, I had made something people want. But I had no idea what I wanted or how to make that happen. I was Bill Nighy in Living.
How real stories are born
But I was 38, not 83, and I resolved to do two things:
- Stop imitating people who I considered successful. I had been so intent on studying how these people operate that I had no sense of my own natural rhythm or sources of satisfaction.
- Train my attention. Now that I was alone with my thoughts, I was horrified to discover I could not make it through one page of a book without losing patience. My mind was like a puppy, flailing in every direction at once. How could I learn anything about myself if I was reacting to every tiny stimulus?
If I was going to make good on these resolutions, I had to leave social media, which runs on a fuel mix of 50% imitation (literally, following) + 50% reaction (the opposite of steady attention).
It took longer than I thought. I spent about five years learning to make space for my own voice to become audible to me (let alone others). To summarize a long and winding process, I learned that item #1 (discovering intrinsic satisfaction) is the key to item #2 (attention, focus, flow).
These are the foundation of The Creative Act. There are no shortcuts. It's a winding, often confusing and—if we follow it through—deeply rewarding process. Good stories emerge for it because these stories originate from our own direct experience of life, not from imitating or reacting to others.
The dark cave of trapped stories
We've all read a hundred articles about how social media rots our focus and undermines our confidence. We know the feeling of "doom scrolling." But the less obvious story, beneath the obvious story of its problems, is that social media is changing all the time.
First, we lived the fancy-free childhood years of rainbows and playtime: before algos maxed engagement to sell ads, it was the place to connect and dream. For the past ten years, we've been going through the awkward middle school years of acne, insults and inside jokes. We'll always have a soft spot for Charlie's candy mountain and laser-eyed cats. But sooner or later we tire of Internet puke, rainbows and all—not because it's silly but because it diminishes our potential.
We've already been to the slush pile of middle school jokes a thousand times. "I wonder," we can't help but ask, "what else could social media do?"
If we were watching our own journey through this adventure, we've spent the past years trapped in the dark cave where the monsters live. We don't (yet) know how we'll overcome these monsters, but every time we wake up from a TikTok-induced stupor, we sure as hell want to.
The path to better stories
This question—what will social media become when we've had enough of candy mountain's kidney-stealing ways—has got me excited to experiment with social media again.
Gary Vaynerchuk, one of the OG masters of social understood that social media isn't Hollywood. We don't have two hours to unfold a story. Reaction is the fuel that drives engagement. Heard.
But Gary also realized that good stories are real: they come from real life experience. Thus his philosophy, "Document, don't create." You still need the raw material. You still need something to say.
In conversations online and off, I have a strong sense that social media is in a phase change. Beneath first reactions, we are discovering a more fundamental physics that is untapped by most of today's content: the strong force of a bigger, more meaningful story.
For social media to evolve, we need to learn how to tell big stories in small bites.
My new company, Splotch, is building a tool to convert documentation into a structured flow. Unlike most AI tools, we don't try to generate the creative output for you. Instead, we break what you give us into a step-by-step flow, so you can see and plan out each bit of your story or process, one bite at a time.
I hope this helps more of us to tell bigger stories in smaller (and more delicious) bites.
p.s. We're early days, with lots to build. What we want most is your feedback (drop a note below—or better yet—use the product and then drop us a note :)