Social Bulimia

Joshua Allen, Social Bulimia

“I get a sinking feeling when I launch Twitter,” says one. “It’s as if there is this huge plate of tasteless food in front of me and I have to force myself to consume it.” Another tells me, “Every day I feel a compulsion to process the list, do my retweets, share on Facebook. There is no joy in it; I just get twitchy if I don’t do it.” The travesty of it is that most of the material we’re digesting and passing along to our social media feeds is unoriginal. We can no longer remember why we got started in the first place; we’re trapped into being conduits for little bits of pre-digested “content.”

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When we think about unsubscribing from a feed, for example, we get anxious. We remember the feeling of delight and discovery that made us subscribe in the first place, and we’re afraid of losing that.

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Fortunately, beating social media burnout is far easier than curing compulsive hoarding, kicking a meth habit, or escaping a serial killer. Are you ready? Here it is…

Unsubscribe or Unfollow EVERYTHING. It’s the social media equivalent of burning the house down with all the stuff in it. You need to make sure you have no place to go back to. Force yourself to start fresh.

I admit that I have done this a few times with my RSS, but I haven’t done it yet with Twitter. My solution is to lop off 10% of my twitter upstream buddies every month. This summer my life got too crazy, but I think it is time to do it again.