Social Detox

“When we reduce people to data points, we lose our sense of empathy. We become less human.”
— Jaron Lanier

I’ve been slowly weaning myself off social media, and a few things have become clear.

The first is that reading and writing have come back to me.
My attention doesn’t fracture the way it used to. I can stay with a thought long enough to finish it.

The second is that my anxiety has quieted.
Not disappeared, but softened. The background hum has lowered.

And the third, which surprised me most, is that I’ve restored a sense of hope in my creativity and my career. Not ambition. Hope.

Three years ago, I quit drinking alcohol. For me, alcohol in all forms is a poison. When I stopped, I was finally able to establish a baseline with my emotions, to understand my chemical highs and lows without constantly distorting them. That clarity allowed me to confront a lot of things I had been running from. It gave me a fighting chance to work on my demons instead of negotiating with them.

A few months ago, I was diagnosed with complex PTSD, rooted in my childhood and upbringing. For the last five years, I’ve been working harder than I ever have to recognize my patterns, understand my triggers, and dismantle the behaviors that came from them. The work has been difficult, humbling, and deeply personal, but it has also been effective. I’ve changed in ways I once thought were impossible. I’ll share more of that process here, but for now, this is where I leave it.

What I didn’t anticipate was the next challenge.

Social media.

A few years ago, I met my life partner. She was building a brand through social media, and I watched from the sidelines as her world expanded. I contributed where I could, making photos and films that helped support her growth. It was intoxicating to see work I had made reach thousands of people. To see the doors that opened for her. The invites, the gear, the opportunities.

Before that, I lived mostly on the margins of social media. Facebook. YouTube. Early Instagram, when it felt like a shared sketchbook rather than a marketplace. I loved seeing what a photographer halfway across the world was doing with the same film stock I was shooting. But that didn’t last. It became a place where everything was content, every meal a post, every moment flattened and monetized.

As a photographer and filmmaker, I resented how laziness reshaped the medium. Vertical video forced on us by convenience. A format that once had intention reduced to habit. So I stayed away. I read books. I watched films. I lived outside the feed.

The unhealthy part was that I felt left out.

So eventually, I went in.

I learned the game. I showed up. I worked for free. I fed the machine. Over time, I built an account from nothing to more than 50,000 followers. Opportunities followed. Friendships formed. Sponsors appeared. Doors opened that I never would have imagined, including working with companies like Harley-Davidson and riding alongside people who shape entire industries.

And yet, something was being traded.

In my experience, success on social media requires compliance. You don’t make the art you want. You make the art that performs. You chase the algorithm. You stay on the conveyor belt. Some of the most viral things I’ve made required the least thought, the least care, the least heart. They weren’t bad, but they weren’t honest either.

I felt myself being sold, piece by piece. My attention. My creativity. My relationship to the work.

So instead of a dry January, I’m taking a social media break. I’ve already wrestled with alcohol. This is a different kind of detox. One from urgency. From comparison. From the constant low-level pressure to be visible.

I’m reading again. I’m thinking again. I’m letting ideas take their time.

I’ll be here, writing. I’ll share what I’m reading and what stays with me from those books. And I invite you to respond. To comment. To engage.

Not as an audience, but as a community.

Slowly. Intentionally. Without the machine between us.