Shallow Social Media and Deep Work.

Pop artist John Mayer went through a creative dry spell after releasing the album Continuum in 2006. He wrestled, and finally he closed his Twitter account and confessed on his blog his own creative desert was a result of social media addiction: “The tweets are getting shorter, but the songs are still four minutes long. You’re coming up with 140-character zingers, and the song is still four minutes long… I realized about a year ago that I couldn’t have a complete thought anymore, and I was a tweetaholic. I had four million Twitter followers, and I was always writing on it. ...it started to make my mind smaller and smaller and smaller. And I couldn’t write a song.” 

Social media distraction actually atrophied his creative capacity. “You can’t create lasting art if you are heavily involved in social media. It occurred to me that since the invocation of Twitter, nobody who has participated in it has created any lasting art. And yes! Yours truly is included in that roundup as well. Those who decide to remain offline will make better work than those online. Why? Because great ideas have to gather. They have to pass the test of withstanding thirteen different moods, four different months and sixty different edits. Anything less is day trading. You can either get a bunch of mentions now or change someone’s life next year.”

It's not only Twitter, although it's apparent that limiting discourse to 140 characters obviously limits the scope of thought. Limiting conversation to a photo, ala Instagram, or the power of video to slapstick shorts ala Vine–come-TikTok narrows the mental appetite with sips of dopamine. 

Continually ingesting bits of social media has become a distraction and an inhibitor in the creative development process. Becoming a creative who can generate works with lasting cultural impact requires what Georgetown professor Cal Newport calls “deep work” - which is a combination of working for extended periods of time with full concentration on a single task free from distraction or interruption followed by intermittent rounds of feedback. A process where one wrings every last drop of value out of their current intellectual capacities. Cal Newport maintains that our creative abilities are improved by the mental strain that accompanies deep work.

It's not deep work to swipe or scroll, we all know it's mind numbing. Our cultural addiction to social media is killing songs and artists and dreamers before we ever get to hear their voices, melodies and ideas. I wonder when our grandchildren ask, "What did you do during the 'Shelter-in-Place' of 2020?" most will have to admit that we wasted the days bingeing memes.

Are you a content creator rather than a content consumer? If you've read this far, there's hope for you. Stand up, shut this off, and tune in to the deep work of your own thoughts. 

Boy, You're Gonna Carry That Weight?

Passed a homeless guy yesterday. His shopping cart was overloaded with trash – scraps of plastic, chunks of cardboard – not even recyclable. Trash. My thought was that this was an element of his insanity, to value junk that has no value, and that this was how he ended up where he is – holding on to things without value, and having no room in the cart for things of real value. Maybe it all began because he valued a drug more than his vocation, his family, his home. Speculation. Today, whatever his other addictions, his addiction is to refuse, and his identity is aligned with a small hill of garbage.

Then the mental finger pointed back at myself, and I thought of all the trashy things that I pick up and add to the valueless heap on my shopping cart. No time for conversation with my kids, I have to vegetate on this trashy movie – adding laziness and isolation to the lowest level of my cart. Instead of taking the time to make something good to eat, reaching for something tasty and processed-easy and valueless nutritionally - add that to the waistline of the cart. Atop, scraps of old scripts of “how it happened and why and why me.” Stuff these old traumas and misunderstandings into little spare spaces, letting my offended ego treasure them instead of trash them.

I get lazy or angry or dejected, and I find junk appealing. My hands pick it up, and my head holds it all. Besides the event itself, or the memory of the event, I add an additional layer of insular laziness and anger to my cart. And then, the cart is welded to my hands, and pushing it becomes my identity, my character aligned with my trash.

Again, time to take stock. Roll the cart over to the soulical dumpster and leave some of this refuse where it should have landed long ago. Make room in the cart for what really matters. Empty it and only put in what I want to carry going forward.