THE CREATIVE’S QUANDRY OF 2025
IT’S 2025 AND I’M TRYING TO FIGURE OUT HOW TO CREATE AND SHARE MORE OF MY ART WHILE SPENDING LESS TIME ON SOCIAL MEDIA.
Like a lot of people, apparently, I’m hoping to untangle as much of my life from the world of social media as possible. The reasons aren’t going to be terribly unique or novel.
I read somewhere that the bulk of younger Instagram users would be willing to pay money if it would make the app vanish from existence. That response was even stronger towards TikTok.
Can you imagine hating, for example, a restaurant so much that you would pay for it to go away? It’s no longer enough to go elsewhere, it’s a matter of eliminating its impact on the world you live in.
It hasn’t always been this bad, though. I can’t deny a lot of the really good things that social media has opened up in my life. For the past two decades, I’ve dabbled in a lot of creative endeavors. And social media has been instrumental in how I’ve connected my work with the world at large.
In 2009, it was publishing new poems to Tumblr.
In 2011, it was photography on Flickr and writing on Wordpress.
In 2020, Instagram became the spot where my illustration blew up.
These days, Instagram is still my go-to spot for promoting improv shows and storytelling events.
Having instant access to online platforms for sharing my work helped me get my reps. It allowed me to sharpen my creative skills while having a space to unpack different storylines in my life.
But the good doesn’t outweigh the bad like it used to. This year, I am hopeful to significantly scale back my usage. And that’s going to mean reconfiguring my creative process a bit.
I often get a good burst of creative energy towards the end of the year, and last December was no exception.
I drew a month’s worth of illustrations in about a week. Whenever I sat down to write, the words flowed freely. Making videos felt easier than usual.
There was a lot to make. And the time off work gave me the chance to work on it.
Plus, transitioning from one year to the next makes you look backward and forward at the same time. You get to take a few steps back and see life from a wider lens than you typically do. That sort of big-picture perspective is a great one from a creative standpoint.
So yeah, things were flowing freely.
Even more importantly, making them felt fun. Bringing things in my head to life on paper had some real flow. And at the moment, it actually didn’t seem to matter that much how I would publish, share, distribute, promote, or get this stuff out there. At least for a little bit, what mattered was simply bringing them into existence.
Of course, creative life isn’t always like that. Artists make things to be seen and heard. Sure, a lot of us would bristle at the idea of being attention-seeking, but we do want some people on the receiving end of our work. There’s something about performing for an empty audience that feels a bit pointless.
But more often than not, the process of making art and the process of sharing it have felt like separate spheres.
One gives energy, one takes.
One feels fun, the other like a chore.
And as I post another illustration for my five-digit following, only to see that the algorithm only delivered to a couple dozen of them, the latter feels increasingly pointless.
It wasn’t always like this, though.
I came of age when social media was a brand new puppy, ready to be fed with cryptic emo song lyrics and much more innocent feeling memes.
In my quest to turn down the volume of social media, I’ve been asking myself… how would I promote this stuff if it were 2003?
It takes me back to the time where, as a middle schooler, I was on a school trip to New York and a man on the street handed me his mixtape. DaFear. His CD had four tracks, respectively named Track01, Track02, and so on. My seventh grade self was so amused, probably because the subject matter was a bad pairing with my maturity level at the time. But hey, DaFear. I respect the hustle.
If music were my main gig, I don’t know if I would be using quite that same method as DaFear, but I would be trying to go where the people are and to get in front of them. Open mic nights. Coffee shops. One of my favorite performances was a friend of mine who convinced a bakery in 2009 to let him plug in and play for an evening. He invited so many of us it turned into this cozy gathering of friends.
Does that make his stuff do numbers the way it might’ve via Bandcamp? Probably not. But I do know I still listen to his stuff 15 years later, which is more than I can say for many social media discoveries of the era.
If your goal is to massively blow up as an artist, I don’t know if this is a complete strategy. But if you want an audience and want to have more fun, it’s at least a good start.
If I could pin down an experience that I think offers a good model to the creative world at large, it would have to be my improv theatre.
A few years ago I dropped in as an audience member.
A couple years ago, I started classes, graduated, and even took on some electives.
Over the past few years I’ve joined a few indie teams and made a house team.
These days I perform about one show every week.
And since it’s always about the friends we make along the way, I gotta say, it’s given me a good community of people I see on a regular basis.
So basically, this little indie improv theatre has been a place where I can watch others perform, a place where I can learn and get my reps, a place where I can take the stage, and a place where I can hang with my friends. It’s a dojo, a studio, a stage, and a pub all in one.
Makes for a pretty efficient way to get a lot of the things we’re used to turning to social media for.
Improv likely isn’t the thing I consider my primary art form, though it has climbed up the ranks. But my experience with it has made me wish for spaces that offered that for other areas of my creative life.
A place to write alongside writer friends and share and give feedback.
A place to debut digital videos and watch other people’s.
A place for oral storytelling.
In some cases, these things exist. I know of music studios that are very community oriented. Open mics are routine and they give you a chance to meet others to jam with. The world of rec sports has been pretty good at this for a while.
I’ve seen a lot of recently spilled ink suggesting that the social media era as we’ve known it is over.
That in-the-flesh, offline activity will solidify itself as some sort of status symbol, flexing both one’s material privilege in having the time for it, alongside one’s inner willpower to resist the cheap dopamine hits.
Perhaps! I don’t really like to live in the world of speculation. But I do know that over the past 18 months I’ve been telling my team at work to keep exploring ways to promote our work beyond social media. And that I’ve been putting my phone on grayscale to add some friction between myself and the apps. (It’s a good lifehack. Would recommend.)
While the problems with social media are clear, figuring out replacements for its role in our creative lives remains a bit murky. And even though uploading my illustrations to the gram for six reactions feels like shooting it off into the ether, it still feels like I’ve shot my shot.
But the reality is, it’d likely get more than six reactions if I printed one out and put it up in an auto mechanic’s wait area.
Maybe that’s the sort of out of the box thinking that this next chapter of creative endeavors will call for.
Last month, I got a message from a friend looking to book an improv team to perform… at a restaurant. (In my imagination, it’s a dim sum, and the improv scenes need to accommodate wheeled carts of steamed buns and noodles.)
I think more struggling small businesses might be a good partner for struggling small artists. It just takes the initiative to ask the banh mi shop owner if your artist collective could meet there twice a month. Heck, I saw a busker perform at a barbershop during my last haircut.
Forget bringing back Third Spaces, let’s bend the rules entirely and make Ninth Spaces on top of Fifths.
There’s a lot of art to be made. More stories and songs within ya. And more people who need to see it and more people to create alongside. The world is changing, but that part hasn’t.
DaFear, if you’re reading this, lemme hop on a track.