“You won’t believe what you missed on your nap!”
A little disoriented from waking up in our campervan instead of our bed after crashing from our intense Roys Peak hike, I tried wiping the sleep from my eyes as J excitedly continued with his tale.
“These tourists rolled up to the rope swing over there and started taking pics. How long is too long to pose for the perfect shot?”
“I don’t know… 5 minutes?”
“30 minutes. I watched them for 30 minutes. The girl hopped up on the swing and the guy spent the entire time pushing her, then rolling around on the ground with his camera and splashing up water with his hands to take the perfect shot. It was ridiculous!”
“Let me get this straight.. you watched this for 30 minutes like a creep?”
“Yeah. And it was awesome.”
Shaking my head while laughing at my husband’s lack of shame, I looked over at the now empty rope swing. After following all the New Zealand hashtags on Instagram for several months before our trip, I was well aware of the fascination with these swings. The pictures were always so serene, perfectly wavy hair blowing in the wind +/- a daintily pointed toe toward the horizon.
Now after having spent a week in this beautiful country, I had a first hand look behind the curtain of how much work and effort that took as I watched everyone else posing for those perfect shots. And for what? A couple likes on social media?
Following my train of thought, J remarked,
“I hope they’re getting paid to do that… otherwise that’s just too much.”
“You wouldn’t want me to start making you do that for the blog’s Instagram account?”
“No one wants to see me on a rope swing.”
“They just don’t know they want to yet…”
Love/Hate Relationship with Instagram
After almost a year of starting the blog’s Instagram account and watching what other people were doing on this platform, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable with my participation but didn’t understand why.
At first I thought it was because mine was one of the few doctor accounts that didn’t have my face plastered everywhere. Even if I wasn’t trying to stay somewhat anonymous, selfies just aren’t my style – how are you supposed to see the ridges of the gorgeous mountain if my little button Filipina nose is taking up a third of the frame? There are so many more interesting things to look at than the growing crow’s feet crinkling my eyes from 15 years of laughing at my husband’s shenanigans.
As I continued to post my perfectly rotated (s/n: I always seem to rotate my camera 0.55 degrees down to the left), saturated and contrasted pictures, I understood this was only contributing to the comparison war social media has become. Numerous studies have confirmed the more time you spend on social media, the worse you feel as you size up your life to someone else’s highlight reel. For all of my effort to be “real” and “authentic” online, here I was, carefully curating my happy places and moments for someone else’s consumption.
A Jekyll/Hyde split was happening in my online persona: Instagram became where my positivity resided while the blog was where I was actually free to be me (s/n: I guess that makes my baseline Hyde). I was knowingly fragmenting myself into these different segments of my personality – how do you reconcile this without fully stepping away?
How do you make real connections if the person you’re presenting isn’t really you?
Finally, I became increasingly aware of the follow/unfollow game people engage in:
- Liking 4 or 5 of your most recent posts in hopes you’ll follow them
- Following, then unfollowing you 3 days later
- Posting the same copy/paste comment that may or may not have anything to do with the picture you put up
- “Follow trains” to inflate the number of followers no matter if their material speaks to you or not
In a world where you can connect with someone half way across the world with a click of a button, the prevalence of fake connection as a strategy totally caught me off guard.
None of this is what I had intended my presence online to be.
How To Increase Your Instagram Followers
- Use pictures that show your face
- Use hashtags – 30 max
- Follow other people and hope they follow you back
- Post every day, even multiple times a day
- Comment on other people’s stuff
- Use Instagram stories and live…
As I went down the list of different strategies recently proposed by the Facebook social media strategy group I was in, I was surprised by the inward cringe I was experiencing.
Finally, it hit me:
We’re all still hustling for our self worth.
That tourist couple, other doctor accounts on social media, and yes, even me.
Every like, every comment, every new follower validates our existence in these spaces.
It’s probably the reason I started the blog to begin with, if I’m being entirely honest with myself. I can call it my passion project now, but at the time of its inception perhaps I was searching for someone else to validate my burnout journey. I wanted someone to tell me I wasn’t choosing to be a “bad” doctor.
But here’s the problem with getting your likes and validation in the virtual space:
It’s a quick fix but inconsistent and fleeting.
It will always demand more as the dopamine rush at seeing those little hearts fades.
It comes at the cost of being present in your actual reality.
We keep working so hard for something we never needed to hustle for to begin with.
What we have accomplished in our own right is enough – we don’t need to continue to seek relevance in these online pageants.
Our worthiness has never needed validation from the 2 second attention of strangers.
We are enough simply as we are.
So why keep going?
I stumbled 2 weeks ago when I was trying to sort out whether I was doing this all for the likes and self-validation, so people I’ve never met could say nice things about me. I needed to flesh out why I should continue to promote what seemed like my own personal vanity project.
There had to be a purpose in continuing to engage in what feels like a hypocritical venture and until I found it, I was going to keep my silence.
When I shared this with HD of Hormones Demystified fame*, he flat out told me I wasn’t allowed to ghost the blog lest people wonder if something terrible had befallen me – an outcome I hadn’t really considered.
In mulling over my blind spot, I realized the blog has taken on a life of its own – it’s really not about me and my hustle for self worth anymore. Perhaps people have connected with my story in ways I have yet to become aware.
And ultimately, that’s really why I started on this journey – to find connection.
Connection to something real, with all its flaws and imperfections. Bypassing the layers of editing and filters we’ve applied before we put our perfectly curated lives on display – great for 2 second glimpses on social media, but barriers to seeing a fellow kindred spirit.
I still want people to know they’re not alone in their struggle with burnout. That their thoughts and feelings are not signs of personal failure. That there is a community out there that understands what it was like to be in that dark pit, and we’re ready to extend a helping hand to pull them out.
I still want people to remember there is a world beyond the fluorescent lights of the workplace, places you just need to step outside and discover for yourself. So I’ll continue to post pictures of places that made me happy because maybe they’ll bring a smile to someone else, number of likes and followers be damned. And if the hike to get to that pic sucked, I’m going to put that in the caption too.
I’m going to follow people who bring value to my real life rather than chase the affection of random people who will ignore the stuff I put online – my message isn’t for them.
And I still have so much to say.
Unfortunately social media is a necessary evil to get my message out there, but I’m going to use it with purpose and intention instead of it serving to momentarily inflate my sense of well-being.
I’m done with the hustle.
Are you?
***
Photo taken of the grey glacial river flowing through the Hooker Valley Track in New Zealand.
***
*Incidentally, HD is one of those people who says nice things about me in his two-year blogiversary! If you’ve been looking to jump into the fight against alternative medicine, you have to check out his blog at Hormones Demystified!
I am a pediatrician/at home mom/new grad student in Health Communications and my last class was about interactive marketing. I could feel viceral body reactions to some of the things I was learning to increase your “follower” traffic. I concluded to my professor at the end of the class that I was glad I had learned the information, so I can know that is NOT what I want to use my communications degree for. I am much better at personal communication.
It is such an internal conflict for me – on one hand, it feels so inauthentic as it seems like I’m compromising my integrity. On the other, I don’t know how else to reach other people who are/were struggling with burnout so this is how I get my message out there.
In the end, I don’t really care about the follower and engagement numbers. I’m already happy about the number of people who’ve reached out to me and the connections I’ve been able to make. At least that’s how I’m justifying the means 😅
Thanks for commenting and if you have any tips on how to actually communicate authentically without selling my soul, I’m all ears!!
Hmm, not sure how to approach this one:
1. Your blog, along with the personal story that you tell, is meaningful to people reading it. Some of their lives are actually improved by reading it.
2. Your photos on Instagram are enjoyable to view. No one’s life is necessarily elevated but for a few nanoseconds. Just a quick dopamine hit, a guilty pleasure.
3. If your photos on Instagram bring joy to someone AND get that person to read and connect with your blog, that’s a double win.
All of the other stuff is unimportant. Maybe I missed the point. 🙁 Or maybe not. 😉
VBMD,
I appreciate your perspective.. maybe I’m overthinking it as I am wont to do 🙂
I avoided social media for over a decade. I made a Twitter for the first after seeing some blog traffic from there. Now I waste hours swiping and scrolling. I don’t feel like any of my days are better for it. The likes and the hearts and this constant comparison game. Bleh…I dislike it immensely.
It is all made worse by knowing that the people making these things are intentionally exploiting our minds and attention. We are walking around with slot machines in our pockets. You aren’t the customer, you and your attention are the products being sold to the advertisers. And there are hundreds of very smart people designing AI that can manipulate you to great effect.
What trustan Harris has to say about this problem is sobering.
https://www.google.com/amp/s/www.wired.com/story/our-minds-have-been-hijacked-by-our-phones-tristan-harris-wants-to-rescue-them/amp
Thanks for sharing that article – it was a great read! I had to pull back from Twitter – that is the one platform that I could tell immediately it was bad for my mental health. Instagram, though, is a harder addiction to break… it’s just so pretty!
I think there is a way to make the icky feeling of shameless self-promotion better – by making it about serving others and not ourselves. People are going to be spending time on the internet – we might as well provide something of value that makes them better for it. At least that’s how I’m framing it… but for me in my personal life, I’ve done a lot to make sure I don’t go down these time vortices and my attention doesn’t get pulled a million ways when I’m online: Unroll.me for my email and stayfocusd for chrome.
It’s always a struggle though.
First of all, you know that I love your message. I completely relate to it and I think your voice is an important one. I look forward to all of the posts that you write. It makes me find some sanity that I am not the only one who feels this way about medicine.
So, please keep writing. And I’ll keep promoting you. Not because of the likes or shares but because it is an important message to share.
TPP
Thanks TPP. We are definitely not the only ones who feel this way about medicine, and comments like that remind me why I’m still doing this.
You’d think with all the people we interact with on a daily basis, we wouldn’t feel like we’re in our own little silos all the time. But I’ve found the opposite in my experience and with what other people have shared with me. We’re all afraid of having these hard conversations for fear of being called out as bad doctors.
Thanks for the spreading my message and I’ll continue to broadcasting yours! Keep up the strong work!
Look in the mirror and tell yourself it’s a hobby! Maybe write that on a post it note. It’s not a business, it’s not a lifestyle, it’s not a calling and it’s not a drama especially NOT A DRAMA. Hobbies are for farting around, maybe juxtapose a little prose, or spin a yarn, or write something down and store it in an ectopic brain you can review and expand upon later, maybe archive a couple pics, then you actually go do something worth while like hug your kid.
Although I don’t spend much time on the Twitter or MySpace (that’s still popular, right?), and I didn’t know Pinterest was more of a search engine than a website until you told me, I can appreciate the pitfalls of social media use.
I check my WordPress app more times per day than are truly necessary for the purpose of responding promptly to blog comments. But somehow I’ve convinced myself that I need to check anyway. I’m pretty sure that neuro pathway is firing autonomically at this point. Not good.
I think Gasem has a point, in that we should give our hobbies the weight they deserve, and work on being present for life. Of course, when the hobby involves baring one’s feelings and struggles, that makes it feel like said hobby deserves an extraordinary amount of weight.
The challenge, I suppose, is embracing the idea that you’re in control. You don’t need the fleeting external validation social media provides to tell you that it feels good to share the most important parts of your life. There is a difference between that fleeting external validation, and the validation we feel when we make a real connection with people who find meaning in what we’re putting out into the world.
I don’t think it is easy – at all – to maintain a sharp line of distinction between these two types of validation. Think about the old “tree falling in the woods” question. If you put all of your thoughts out into the world, and nobody was reading it, would you feel just as good about what you’re doing? Would the personal catharsis of writing it all down be enough? Or do you need for your words to resonate with others to feel like this is all worthwhile?
Perhaps there is some stage of enlightenment in which people like us can simply write for the sake of writing and have it be enough. I mean, lots of folks journal, right? But when you put your journal out into the world, it changes the dynamic…the expectations. Should it be that way?
Now, I need to get going. But I’ll check back and refresh every hour or so, to see if you’ve responded! 😉
Is 5 days too late for a response? I know you’re just hanging on every word I say 😉
As the great Brene Brown puts it: “Connection is why we’re here; it is what gives purpose and meaning to our lives.” So I’m taking that to mean that I should blast all my stuff everywhere on the internet without regret.
Seriously though.. I do find it fascinating that social media was created to exploit this need for connection, and the commodity they’re after is your attention. The oncoming backlash I foresee is we’re realizing that attention does not equal connection, and people of my generation are starting to pull back on our use of these platforms.
I’d like to think I’m seeking connection, not attention… I’m definitely not some talking mouthpiece who talks about esoteric chemical structures like I’m on some crusade or something.