I am not a huge fan of aphorisms, but every once in a while I come across something that makes PERFECT SENSE and lately, I haven’t been able to stop thinking about these words: Your energy is your currency. Spend it wisely. Invest it well.
For the past week, I have been thinking a lot about where my energy is going and how I can spend it better and came to the realisation that still too much of my time and energy is spent on social media. Unsurprising, of course, as it is a part of my work, but Instagram in particular, when looking purely at the numbers, clearly has the lowest return on investment.
Remember in June when I had told you that I had temporarily deleted the TIG Instagram account for a week and permanently deleted all of our extraneous accounts? Well, after that blissful week, usage began creeping up again, mostly out of force of habit.
What began as a digital diary to document our daily lives has morphed, for many of us, into something else altogether. Even Instagram no longer sees itself as a photo-sharing app. And then the pandemic hit and we no longer had anywhere to go, and (suddenly) nothing to share, at least not in the same way we did before.
Add to this a feeling of fatigue from all the filters and endless edits, and the curated Instagram feed has seemingly become a thing of the past. I read an interesting summation in a GQ article recently on the subject: “…the past two decades have been some of the most visually rich (but profoundly numbing) in history. It’s been a golden age for looks–first, and in some cases looks–only, life.”
These thoughts merely echoed the ideas that have already been going through my own mind for some time now. Add to this, Demna Gvasalia‘s statement to Vogue that his Spring 2022 collection for Balenciaga was “…indeed a sort of comment on social media culture and how it makes everything look and thrive to be the same. I think social media is boring, and dangerously addictive for some, as well as super manipulative. We need to find new ways of using it that is less harmful for society. The freedom that it ‘suggested’ originally is now governed by algorithms and commercial interests.”
Gvasalia’s thoughts mirrored mine so exactly that I saw it as a sign to perhaps scale back the energy I was expending on Instagram. I had a wild thought: What if I, whenever I had an idea, instead of posting it on Instagram as I normally would, went back to basics and told you about it here?
Featured image via @oliwiapakosz