My Social Media Timeline

I love social media in general.

Or maybe I've loved social media is a more accurate way to put it in January, 2025.

I've benefited tremendously from the ability to reach and connect with people both professionally as well as personally in so many ways. It's hard to imagine my business having the same success without the reality of social media.

I say all that while also wondering what our world would look like right now if Mark Zuckerberg had developed a HotorNot website for cars instead of for girls on campus. Where would we be right now?

Let's pretend there's an alternate timeline where social media doesn't exist.

It just wasn't even created.

We still have blogs, websites, podcasts, RSS readers, YouTube even—but social media as a way to connect with people and follow each other does not exist. There's a million different butterfly effects that could happen where political revolutions, human dignity and decency, racism, injustices, and so much more all do not get confronted because people aren't able to tell their stories in a way that social media allows for, but there's also a whole myriad of ways that social media has been a detriment to society.

I have to believe that in a world without Twitter, people still find ways to overthrow governments and share their stories in ways that change and shape our world. Just like one could argue that social injustice gets confronted because of Twitter, the same argument could be made that right wing Nazi nutters can't organize as easily without social media.

I don't know how to weigh those kinds of things on a magical scale and come up with an answer of good or bad.

But if I reflect on that timeline from a personal level I wonder what I would have done with my time and energy if I wasn't trying to crack jokes on Twitter back in the 2010s, trying to gain some sort of following, posting the right things on Instagram to get likes, coming up with ways to dunk on people when they annoyed me, or spending time thinking about how to best gain some sort of popularity on whichever social media platform was popular at the time?

Time lost to creating for social media

If I look back at the thousands of tweets I wrote and the amount of time that represents in my life? 
That's time that's lost to things like reading, playing video games, getting together with friends or family, being present for what's going on around me in the world. It definitely takes away from my ability to feel what's happening around me. And I don't know on a personal level how to weigh this on some mythical scale where I can see if the net result is a positive one.
Because I've had a successful business that's relied on word of mouth through connections and relationships I've made as a result of social media, but also all the mental energy and time spent consuming and creating for social media. What would I have done with that time? What could I have created? 
What could I have built into? What could I have fostered in myself and those around me in a deeper way? It's really hard to know. 


But it is helpful to evaluate and look at both the positive and the negative effects that something like social media has on your life—has on my life—rather than just continuing on as it is. To evaluate the usefulness of these things that we have just accepted being part of our lives.

In my case, I was on Twitter in 2006—the first year it was built. It's been a huge part of my life. And now that it's gone and I've replaced it with other social networks, I've just done that because that's what we're all doing. I would hope that the relationships I've built with people would survive beyond whether we follow each other on Bluesky, Mastodon, or whatever social network is next.

But likely not.

Do relationships survive if social media doesn't exist?

I know in my life outside of the internet, relationships don't survive very well if you're not regularly connected whether it's a weekly church connection, family connection, badminton group, etc. I find it very difficult to maintain relationships if I don't have a predetermined need or requirement to connect. And in my lower moments of struggles with self esteem, worth, and depression, I think I'm not worth other people's time or effort to maintain a connection with.

But as with bigger world events, I have to believe that we would have discovered different—possibly better—ways to create and maintain relationships with each other than relying on social media. Whether it's the slower connection through someone writing a blog or a newsletter, or hearing someone's journey in life through a video or podcast, humans would have found ways to connect.

Is social media sustainable for me?

I do feel like social media isn't sustainable in my life. Whether it's my age, my time in a given day, my energy for any of these platform—or a combination of all of that. I want to write thoughtfully, record podcasts with intentionality and purpose, and even create longer form videos again. But I feel like I continue to put most of my creative output into social networks that care very little about the quality of what I create, and more about the quantity of what I dump into their input boxes. And care even more about the conflict I can cause with what I post.

I can't come up with a way to end this because I keep checking for replies to a post I made earlier on Bluesky.