The Need to Create

Daily, our brains are bombarded with news flash after news flash, video after video. What’s the best way to start a conversation? Is America undergoing democratic backsliding? You HAVE to try this new hack I just found!

One tries to keep up, but, unlike a salmon swimming upstream, the current is too strong for us, and we drown in the sea of information. We all have different coping mechanisms to this reality.

Some, increasingly so, choose to just tune out. Why bother with the daunting task of cutting through the noise? Because of this, we see reading numbers of newspapers and traditional media declining every year. Instead, people choose to just passively consume brain-numbing media like Instagram or TikTok.

Others choose to try their best, reading tens of articles a day and scrolling through infinite feeds they feel will keep them informed. Some even tailor, consciously or unconsciously, their social media algorithms to feed them bite-sized news updates.

What both groups have in common is that they both dedicate a lot of time to the attention economy. While some may feel like they extract more value from their labors of attention, both group’s time is monetized and sold to the highest bidder. And the attention economy is designed to keep you laboring. Social media platforms are informed by decades of psychological and behavioral research to be designed to keep you engaged. Instagram literally runs experiments on its millions of users to measure whether moving the post button leads to more time spent on the app.

For the second cohort, the motivation to keep themselves informed is the driving force behind their labor. While newspapers and traditional media do not follow the same dark patterns as social media applications, keeping up with their reporting can feel daunting. And people who decide to be informed through social media fall prey to the same addictive designs as the first group.

Media companies benefit from our attention because of their ad-based business model in which our time is literally their product. But every new TikTok you watch is also digital labor. Collectively, every day, we generate exabytes (billions of gigabytes) of data that can be fed to algorithms that can predict our interests, allowing for further personalization of advertising, and to companies that use this data, purchased from data brokers, to make business decisions.

All this time spent leads to less time spent in other of life’s activities. This is backed up by research. People now spend less time with friends than they ever have before. They read less (only 50% of Americans even read a book in a year), exercise less, talk less, and socialize less. Consuming content becomes a primary activity.

Obviously, this shift does not exist in a bubble and is also fed by other conditions like the decline of the existence of “third places” (places outside work and home where people can socialize) and the cultural shift towards isolation. But I posit that the drive to consume media is one of the biggest factors driving this shift.

Tackling this issue is hard. It is a polycrisis that is leading to record levels of loneliness, mental illness, and heightened polarization. But we have power. As I explained previously, we are the ones who labor every day on digital platforms. Weare the product. So we can make a choice to not be that product.

Here, you’d expect a paragraph telling you to delete social media. But I’m not going to say that. For all its drawbacks, social media does provide a lot of value in our lives. It allows us to talk with one another, be informed, and discover new interests we’d never thought of before.

Therefore, the solution I propose is simple yet complex. We need to create for ourselves. Social media encourages us to consume. But consumption is passive, and our ability to participate is limited to the comment box. Record numbers of people are becoming content creators, but being a content creator does not count as the kind of creation I’m advocating for. When you become a content creator, you necessarily perform for others.

What I propose is that you create for yourself. Write a journal. Write a story. Start a blog! Share it with friends if you feel like it. But the point is, even if others see what you create, you need to create it with the audience in mind being yourself.

I think this is an especially powerful act for three reasons:

1. Social Media teaches us we need to create a palatable version of ourselves anyone can digest. Anyone can see our Instagram profile, so we tailor it to be acceptable to anyone. When we create for ourselves, we allow our personality, thoughts, and identity to shine through, escaping this great filter of moderation.

2. It teaches you to take back time for yourself. One of the greatest actions I think I’ve ever done for myself is to take upon the habit of reading every single day. Starting this habit allowed me to know I’m capable of making these changes, and then, when I decided I also wanted to journal every day, I was able to do it. I now scroll less in my afternoons because I spend time creating.

3. It allows you to feel like you’re leaving something behind. Do you want your grandchildren to read back your Instagram comments? Probably not. If you create and you archive your creations for posterity, you’re creating a trail that others will probably read some day. Even if they don’t, you’re creating something you can look back to. Recognizing your life is worth remembering is an important action .

This is my first article in this new blog I call “SDR0.” I’m not sure what it will turn into, but I just want to create something I can look back to and be proud of. I want to reclaim my time. I want to be happy. After all, that is the point of life.