Deeper conversations

This past week I’ve been lucky enough to have long phone and video conversations with three artist friends. These are some things we touched on in those conversations and now I’m really thinking about them. I thought you might find them interesting and useful as well.

Social media is a bust

All of these conversations highlighted for me how social media is a complete failure. I knew it but now I KNOW it, know it. We all talked about how social media makes you feel like you are in contact with friends but how shallow the connections actually are. Swapping out the poor quality social media interactions for actual conversation where you can hear the other person’s voice, or if you are video calling, see their face too, is qualitatively better.

All four of us have divested or are mostly divested from social media and we touched on how that’s impacted us and our connections. I know I’ve struggled to maintain connections in a more meaningful way. I’ve had to be more intentional about reaching out to folks by email or text or occasionally via phone or even more occasionally meeting in person.

I thought I would miss social media SO much and I suppose I do miss the ease of it. However, what I’m learning since leaving is that the ease was fake because the connections were so shallow and so easily passed over. Talking with someone and sitting with their experiences is just so different from passively getting information about their lives as I scroll past.

The move away from social media has shifted our art practice

My practice was built on sharing my work on social media for accountability. Without it who am I accountable to exactly? Besides myself? Several of the conversations I had touched on this too. We are all learning how much our practices were influenced by and bound up with social media. And figuring out what we’re doing now that we’ve let go of using social media for that outlet. (Full disclosure: I am on Bluesky and I love it there but I treat it like old school Twitter. I post my art and my dogs and about politics and also what I made for dinner. It’s not carefully curated like my Instagram was. I’d love to connect with you there but know going in, I talk about a lotta stuff!)

So I know I am building back some new practices in place of sharing on social media. What does it look like to make work only for myself? To keep some things only for me and for people I can show them to in person? Can I be satisfied without my work being witnessed by others? Maybe this process allows me more room to make things for shows? Maybe there’s just more room to make for making’s sake? No rules, just make.

Talk about what you are working on without pictures

I also noticed in these conversations we all had a real need to hear about what the other person was working on. And what an odd feeling it is to try to articulate what’s going on right now in my practice that doesn’t include pictures!

When I think about the things I’ve been working on, so much of it is in the “sit around and ponder it” stage anyway so to try to talk about that part always feels a bit like I’m just making up some BS and hoping the other person doesn’t think it’s dumb. Maybe it’s all dumb. Or maybe it’s all things we all have to go through in order to get to the good stuff. Sometimes my art practice feels like I am endlessly reinventing the wheel but slowly but also make it more painful.

When they described what they were working on, I was riveted though!! It gave me so much energy for chasing my own rabbits to know these friends are out there engaging in their own artistic pursuits. Their process doesn’t sound dumb or painful so maybe?? mine doesn’t either?

Flourishing attention

What several of us also noticed is how our attention for longer form things has started to expand the longer we have been off of social media and the endless scrolling. I know my attention for reading non-fiction and for sustaining longer spans of time crocheting without stopping to scroll has increased significantly. Whenever I think about this change I can’t help but remember the Mary Oliver line, “Tell me, what is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

I won’t be squandering my time with the endless scroll to nowhere. I know that.

This has been a slow process for me. I quit all of the Meta products in January. I’ve had a lot of different things going on this year so maybe it’s been happening all along but it became really apparent to me in September. I was at my house for an extended period and I completed this shawl in four days.

And since then, I’ve noticed my attention, particularly for crochet has expanded quite a bit. In fact, I’ve been on a bit of a tear here lately. And it’s because I’m not constantly reaching for my phone to check social media.

This is my takeaway

I need more phone calls with friends in my life. More conversations about real things. Deeper looks into topics and issues with more time invested. This is deeply counter cultural right now. This feels like the right direction to head in. Maybe you are feeling it too?

Where are you digging in deeper? I’d love to hear about it! Email me or start a conversation by leaving a comment on this post! If you’d like to keep up with what I’m working on, I’d love to have you as a newsletter subscriber. I include blog posts from here, cool things I find online, and pictures of my dogs. Sign up here.