The INTERNET & SOCIAL MEDIA vs CREATIVITY and WRITING

And how it robs us of attention, focus, joy. (Aka, my battle for 2024)

Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash

I’ll paint you a picture:

I’m currently between projects. Really only one week out from handing in a revision I owed one of my editors on January 15^th. This is a rare moment for me, because I feel like I am always on a deadline. During this time, unlike all the other days of the year (when I get up, make my coffee, and either block the internet using Freedom, or go up to my second floor which has no internet, with only my laptop, coffee, and a book, I am not so strict with myself.

So for the last seven days, I haven’t blocked the internet at all, and sometimes I stay downstairs, which means I can access email, the NYTimes, shopping sites, and all my favorite real estate sites. Translation? For the last seven days, during my mornings, I’ve been completely scattered, unfocused, unproductive, and going down real estate rabbit holes for hours.

Frankly, it all makes me kind of miserable.

At first it felt kind of fun to spend my morning with no agenda and all the freedom of scrolling around, because I almost never do this. But it disturbs me how a) quickly my routines devolved but even more so b) how hard it is to get back onto the no-internet, no-surfing wagon.

I’ve long known that social media and random scrolling makes me pretty ,extremely unhappy (see my anti-INSTAGRAM article from last year), despite the positives, and blah, blah, blah. (I know for me the positives ultimately do not outweigh the negatives, and I think most of us are kidding ourselves when we try to convince ourselves they do. See Emma Gannon’s post about getting off Instagram here, and Emi Nietfeld’s extremely honest article about social media, being an author, and needing therapy to get through the whole business.)

But because I’m basically not on social media at all by now, I’m truly just scrolling around random sites on the internet here—and it’s still making me miserable.

The result of my recent lack of restraint is as follows:

1.     Total loss of focus and direction of thought.

2.     Complete fragmentation of my attention.

3.     I can barely read more than a book page at a time.

4.     The loss of the pleasure I feel while lost in a book.

5.     The loss of joy I feel when I am writing and really into it.

6.     The self-punishment that results when I realize how much time I’ve lost and how unhappy it’s all made me.

And I know too—because I’ve been involved in research projects about the internet, social media, smartphones, etc. and how it’s killing our attention spans, etc.—that THIS IS NOT ABOUT MY LACK OF WILLPOWER. Because everything about our devices, the places we scroll, the apps we use, are fueled with the theory that goes into the design of slot machines. As in, they are literally, actually designed to addict us like our slot machine and keep our eyeballs glued so we cannot walk away. We just cannot.

Even so, I feel bad, bad, bad about myself after only a week. And inside I’m like, Donna Freitas! You pride yourself on how you kill the internet every morning of your existence to protect your creative life and writing, and here you are, in seven days and POOF, it’s all for naught!

So, my plan starting this week: I need to get back onto the no-internet wagon. Period. Regardless of being between projects. Because I want a healthy, happy mindset, I want to feel good about the start of my days, and I care deeply about the health of my creativity and writing life. I really think that to let myself go on this way much longer, I’m going to lose the plot so to speak. Because this stuff we’re doing, all the scrolling, scrolling, scrolling, literally changes our brains as we do it. And I don’t want the internet and social media to take my brain and rob me of my favorite part of myself, which is my creativity.

My creativity is just too precious, to give it away to something as dumb as scrolling in an uncontrolled manner. To allow my brain to be altered so that it no longer works in this way that brings me joy. I mean, what if my brain changed so much I couldn’t get myself back? (I mean, that could happen. It does actually happen.)

Not to be dramatic but: staying offline, protecting our attention spans and the creativity that comes with this attention, focus, and getting lost in a book and in our work, our writing, our art, feels like the Battle of this Era we’re living in. I’ve come to believe—really and truly—that we must protect ourselves from losing our attention, focus, and the creativity that comes with these things (plus the joy and pleasure)—protect it like our lives depend on it.

Because the creators behind all these apps and platforms don’t care if we’re miserable, or if we lose everything that brings us joy because of their work. They care about making money off our eyeballs, and besides, the more we creatives flounder and fail, the better A.I. can step in and render us completely useless.

So, tomorrow is another day, and tomorrow when I wake up, I am going to block the internet from the moment I get out of bed. That’s the way it works for me and I’m sticking to it. Because I must.