Where do we go

Why I'm pulling back from social media and focusing on building my own coven

Welcome to Dear Clementine, where I write about feminism, community, politics and pop culture. Dear Clementine is a place for people with shared values to come together to not only be seen but also to connect with each other. If you’re seeking something more than social media is offering, this is the place for you. Subscribe at the link and become part of my coven x

---

Despite all my best intentions and Monday morning resolutions, I take my phone to bed with me every night.

I lie in the dark, scrolling or swiping through various social media platforms, allowing myself to feel more and more agitated by the process and yet unable to relinquish it. Just one more post and I’ll put it away. Just ten more swipes.

Stop this! my brain screams at me. Why are you doing this? You’re not even enjoying it!

No, I’m not. Are any of us?

I’m not saying anything surprising here. Last week, I shared a note on Substack asking if anyone else felt similarly exhausted by the constant online churn. The response suggested I wasn’t alone.

We’re not supposed to enjoy social media. We’re not supposed to experience our phones as little carriers of wonder, moments of bliss delivered to us throughout the day. They aren’t meant to feel like the gift of a beautiful sunset, or the smell of an impending storm. We’re not meant to be amazed by them. All of this supposed “connection” is not meant to remind us of how deeply lucky we are to alive.

Its purpose was never to make us feel more human, but to make us feel less.

I’m old enough to remember a time not just before the kind of social media we’re saturated with in 2024, but before mobile phones were even a commonplace thing. I spent my whole first year at university without one, largely because I associated them with the wealthy girls I’d gone to school with, who wore button down shirts with pearl necklaces and whose highlights were done in proper salons paid for by their mothers. Phones were superfluous symbols of privilege, and we didn’t really need them then anyway. If you wanted to hang out with someone, you simply had to head to one of three meeting spots - the Barr Smith lawns (before 2pm), the Unibar (after 2pm) or the Exeter Hotel off campus (after 6pm). This was when I was still living with my parents, and catching the train to and from university was at least an hour long trip. On the days I forgot to bring a book, I’d have no choice but to stare out the window and think.

Daydream. Imagine. Just exist.

I caved in my second year with a Nokia 5110, a bright yellow brick with a piercing ring tone whose only entertainment beyond texting and calls was a game called Snake. Despite my initial resistance, my commitment to Phone was quickly established. Over the years, I’ve upgraded to newer and flashier models. This year will be the first time I haven’t upgraded my iPhone, because I can no longer ignore the reality of the human enslavement atrocities in Congo - atrocities I learned about, ironically, through one of the same phones made as a result of them.

I don’t know how we heal ourselves as a species. I do know that the people and organisations who rely on our consumption are motivated not be a desire to make us more connected, happier or more innovative but to keep us distracted, miserable and easily manipulated. I feel utterly exhausted by watching people trying to drive up ‘engagement’, or seeing endless commentary lamenting how punitive the ‘algorithm’ is to certain ‘content creators’. Even all these words and phrases are exhausting, and I often find myself feeling completely resistant to wanting to produce anything.

Lately, I’ve been seeing more and more products being pushed online that advertise a retro experience. Cameras without digital screens to keep people in the moment, camcorders to capture an ‘old school’ home movie vibe, even a digital typewriter to keep you on the task of writing. It seems obvious to me that our brains are not equipped (and have actually never been equipped) to deal with the hyper overload of sensory stimulation that we’re immersed in now - but instead of fixing that as a society, we’re just finding more ways to sell the alternatives as quirky activities.

It reminds me of a tweet I read many years ago from The Sulk: “I don’t live. I imagine people watching me live, and then I pose.”

I want so very badly to live. I want to wake up and not automatically reach for my phone, starting the scroll before I’ve even wiped the sleep from my eyes. I want to take photographs and wonder what they’ll look like once I develop them. I want to sit on trains and buses and planes and be so bored that I have no choice but to use my imagination. I want to read a book without feeling every five or ten minutes like it’s time to check my phone, for reasons I can’t even really articulate to myself or justify. I want to stop worrying that my value is dependent on how many followers I have on free platforms where those numbers really translate into nothing at all. I want to stop feeling the adrenaline rush of fighting online. I want to stop steeling myself against online abuse. I want to make a living, and my that I mean I want my work to feel like it is also living.

I want to use my time purposefully, rather than have myself be used purposefully by corporations and billionaires who’ve admitted they wouldn’t want their own children using the online drugs they’ve created to suck us all dry.

I don’t think we’re meant to live like this. And yet, I don’t know how to live any other way, especially as my work relies on at least some kind of online presence. But maybe there’s a way to bring some balance back in to my life. Over the past year, I’ve noticed how much less of myself I’ve shared online. I find myself more able to experience moments without needing to record them for others - to live without posing. When I went trekking in Nepal recently, I barely used my phone at all. Instead I had rich and vibrant conversations with the women in my trekking group, or walked by myself and spent time with my own thought. I marvelled at the world and all its beautiful softness, its dangerous edges.

And if I can bring some balance back into my life, maybe there’s also a way to use these spaces to bring connection and humanity back into these spaces. Before Twitter and Facebook and Instagram and all the other little dopamine factories that feed us little bites of cheese as long as we stay on the hamster wheel, we used to write blogs. To have even ten people read your thoughts was incredible. We formed communities of writers, made friends with people we might otherwise have never met. There was collegiate love for each other, a sense of collaboration. We’re all in this together, we thought. We didn’t fixate on ‘followers’ or ‘engagement’ or ‘building a profile’, but instead built community with each other.

I think we can do that again. I care more about doing that than I do increasing my numbers on apps that don’t care about me OR humanity in general, but who do need all of us to drive money to its shareholders while creating free content for its archives. I think about the employers I’ve had over the course of my writing career, and how much they’ve profited from me when my reputation and work benefited them and yet been so quick to jettison me when it got a bit too hot. I’ve been let down by so many people I was foolish enough to trust, and I’ve been far too generous with my time and how much of myself and my valuable thoughts that I give away for free. I’m not a content creator - I’m a writer and a thinker AND someone who helps others see the strength and value in themselves. I have to start seeing the value in myself, and start reserving it for those who see it too.

And so as we close out 2024, I’m also going to be massively reducing my presence in spaces like Instagram, Threads and every other site that has gotten its hooks into my brain for the past decade. I’ll be writing mostly for my Substack and Patreon subscribers (including explainers, advice columns, pop culture shenanigans, feminist articles and news round ups), but I’ll also be focusing on creating actual IRL gatherings and community experiences for those who want to be a part of what I’m looking to build: more hiking, friend making groups, learning together, a feminist lecture series, group holidays and weekends away, writing clubs, gatherings and fun times. I’ll also be shifting my podcast onto Substack and Patreon, so it will only be available to subscribers here to listen to.

We will suffocate ourselves if we stay in the vortex of the online world, and in the churn of giving everything of ourselves away in the hopes of meaningless ‘engagement’. What we need is connection with people who care, and that’s what I’m interested in being part of now. Think of it like my coven, my clemunity, my inner circle - if you want to be part of it, then I want you here.

More to come (including details of an end-of-year picnic for coven members only.)