If you’ve followed this blog for a while, you know that a) it’s gone dark for months, almost years at a time (only becoming active if I have a new release coming out) and b) I’ve been mulling over the negative impact of spending so much time on social media for a while now. The reason for this blog being such a dead zone is directly proportional to the time I spend on other social media sites.

I look at the increased time spend on sites such as TikTok (where I get the most engagement), as well as Instagram, Facebook, etc and I can say that all the dancing and mugging for the camera has increased my traction as a writer. Maybe not much, but more than if I did nothing at all. I can look at my book sales for proof. Since the release of A Nose for Death (Ginny Reese Mysteries Book 4) in April, scarcely a day goes by when I don’t make at least one sale, and on a good day, as many as ten. That’s a far cry from when I first started publishing and I was lucky if a book made 50 lifetime sales.

But all that jumping through hoops has come with a cost: to my productivity as a writer, to my ability to focus and complete a single task, to my mental health, to my belief that kindness and empathy should be valued traits and not shunned.

To the belief that creativity is a uniquely human trait, and that we will always need art, music, and stories shared by our fellow beings.

And every time I say I’m going to do a digital detox to reset my brain and my mental health, I always have a “but, but, but…” as a reason to keep scrolling. I’m about to release a new book, I need to promote the last book, I have events planned online, I don’t want to lose traction with readers, I just started an Instagram account for the puppy, I’m considering becoming a UGC creator so I can finally realize my dream of retirement and can devote myself to writing full-time…

But I’m barely writing at all. Maybe a thousand words a month. I’ve lost confidence in my ability to tell a cohesive and entertaining story. I can’t complete a paragraph without the driving urge to pick up the phone and check my latest TikTok numbers. And this is after I decided to stop trying to market so much and concentrate more on writing again. Time and again, I’d tell myself I needed a digital detox. I’d manage to go a few days, and then I was right back again, checking Bluesky first thing in the mornings, posting to Instagram in the afternoons, and TikTok at night.

This morning (on Bluesky) I came across a post that really resonated, however. It was from @earthlyeducation on Instagram, and in it, the speaker explained that in the past, capitalism drove colonization and land grabs–but now that there is no more land to be colonized, our time is being colonized. Our time and our data, so that we’ll spend even more time on social media and can have even more ads specifically tailored to us.

It was a shocking revelation for me. This notion that social media platforms need to expand by grabbing more of our time and attention. It shouldn’t have been, given how much our social interactions have changed since the advent of smartphones. I can readily accept that social media is a source of much misinformation and deliberate manipulation of the news. But this idea that my time is being stolen from me much in the same manner as land and labor has been stolen from so many people before now was somehow astonishing to me.

So yeah, I’m thinking a digital detox is in order. Maybe until the New Year. Maybe longer. Will I severe ties with social media entirely? Good question. Maybe we’ll get this current book drafted and then we’ll see.

I’m sharing the @earthlyeducation post with you below. Something to think about.