Eyes down (again) for a Substack summer
Why I'm repeating last years experiment - with a twist.
This post was originally written in July 2024 - and it pretty much sums up how I feel now. Except this year I am going further and won’t be doing a photo-a-day thing on Instagram. Instead I am going to take a bit of an Insta-break to evaluate whether it still has a place in my social media life or whether it really has had it’s day.
I’m going all in with this and making a bit of a public declaration.
This summer I am going to be dramatically scaling back on my other social media use and focusing my energies almost solely on Substack. I’m not saying that I won’t be using other social media at all but I will be taking a good hard look at how it plays into my plans for my business and it’s impact on my overall mental health and wellbeing.
A conversation with
the other day made me realise that I have to draw a distinction between the time I spend on social media for ‘work’ and the time I spend there for, well, socialising. The two are quite distinct, quite separate and yet in my own mind there is a significant blurring of the boundaries.What turns into a quick 5 minute post update on Instagram or a story upload - for my business - can turn into a 30 minute scroll through a whole festival of eye candy. Delightful accounts to be sure and often I’m chatting to ‘real life’ friends too, but in no way could that be considered work. It’s definitely a leisure activity and I need to recognise that and treat it as such.
Blurring of the boundaries with regards to social media is just one of the things I have been guilty of recently and it’s taken some big conversations with myself to realise that. It’s all too easy to get to the end of the day and close my laptop thinking I’ve been really productive when in all honesty I’ve created very little - I have consumed way more content than I created.
I recently read a tip from someone (I’m so sorry - I can’t remember who it was) who said they put their phone into airplane mode at night before they went to bed. Then, in the morning they didn’t put it back into regular mode until they had created or written one thing, anything. It didn’t matter what they had created, the point was to do something creative for yourself, while your brain was well rested and refreshed. To use you best, fresh creative energy for yourself rather than squandering it on the endless, never-ending, bottomless scroll.
The Instagram Gods won’t ever be grateful to you for your early morning scroll habit, but your draft posts folder might just love you for forever.
For me, Substack sits apart from other social media. It offers genuine connection and support in a way that I don’t think I’ve experienced anywhere else. And I love how organic it is for people to find others in a similar niche. There is a lot of negativity around algorithms recently especially in regard to Instagram but here they seem to be doing something right.
Do you use Notes? I have been a fairly recent convert to using Notes here but it has introduced me to some truly phenomenal writers that I genuinely don’t think I would have come across in any other way. My Instagram account only ever shows me knitting and small business content - that’s how I’ve trained it after all. Whereas here I get to read so much more widely, across such a range of interests and genres. It’s eye opening and inspiring in equal measure.
For the times when I’m happy to scroll I want my days to be full of that kind of scrolling - and less of the endless, bottomless scroll of Instagram glossy perfection.
Half an hour on Substack has the potential to lead me down all sorts of glorious rabbit holes in a way that I genuinely don’t get anywhere else. I leave Substack feeling uplifted, energised and connected - I can’t say the same for any other social media platform.
Because I’m curious which would you say is the social media platform that gives you the most satisfaction or makes you happiest*?
This was last years poll for reference:
*defined however you want
This is Essay 5 in the 24 Essays Club series, kindly hosted by
You might enjoy a few of my previous contributions:
Essay 4: No politics please, we’re knitters
Essay 3: Never knit with green yarn
Essay 2: Swedish Death Cleaning
Ever since I discovered Substack, I noticed how overstimulated scrolling on IG made me feel. The difference was night and day. Now I am also going to do an experiment to focus mostly on my own blog and substack. Go back to slow content, play to my strengths instead of spending an hour on creating a reel no one will see. Yes, substack feels like the early days of IG and blogging and I love it! I am calling the trend of slow social media coming back. When things lean too much to one side (ultra fast content), there will always be something to counter that ✨ And I am all here for it! Crochet (or knitting) is a slow craft after all. We were never meant to fit into a 5 second reel…
I was active on FB for years - hours lost each week on stuff I now can't remember. Never joined Twitter and had accounts on Pinterest and Instagram but seldom ventured to either. In March, I closed my FB acct and never looked back.
I have been writing and reading Substack since Jan2024 and the quality of content keeps me engaged and thoughtful. In fact, I have to manage my time on Substack because I could read for hours. I use Notes mostly to promote my own writing but I have found that commenting on other writer's essays actually garners a fair amount of followers and subscribers.
There's plenty of evidence supporting the damage social media does to our brains, our teenagers, our communities and our countries. A recent poll of US high schoolers revealed that almost half want to be influencers as their careers! Think about that...
Now with AI moving taking over technology, we don't really know what is real or not. Here in the US, tech bros have bought their way into our politics and it is ugly and in our upcoming budget bill, they have managed to remove all regulation and pre-empt future regulation. Their products are about addiction - getting us to stay for one more post, one more click. My partner spends hours each morning doing just that. He knows its a waste of time but he gets sucked into reels.
My adult son worked in corporate marketing for a few years and after he left that field, both he and his partner closed all of their social media. He told me awful stuff he was told to do to lure/entice/sell on SM.
For me, leaving SM was an act of rebellion against the tyranny of corporations and politics.