Social media made me feel like a bad politician, constantly trying to do things I didn’t really care about just to gain votes. 😂 So, this is the story of why I decided to quit it altogether, despite the apparent “success” of my 10k+ Instagram account.
We can say the final push was heartbreak. But to be fair, it was a long build-up. My entire journey on social media felt like a constant struggle—just trying to keep up with an algorithm’s demands to stay somewhat relevant, while my genuine creativity was slowly killed off by recurring burnout.
Sadly, working with free content was the most disheartening part. It often felt like no one cared about anything I posted. People were only there for the free stuff, and didn’t even pretend otherwise. And in the rare moments when someone did interact with me, it was often to make me feel like I owed them something for free.
That experience isn’t unique to me, unfortunately. It’s already become a meme how people will comment a single word—“pattern?”—on designers’ posts.
But what truly defined my experience was extreme isolation. It felt like working for and interacting with a cruel void. You scream and there’s no answer. No interaction, no appreciation, no genuine interest in what you do. It’s really hard to find meaning in any of it. Most of the time I ended up thinking, “Why even do all this? It’s not like anyone cared anyway.”
I sadly believe that theory about the internet losing its human factor. In the end, we’re all just automatically consuming things made by bots. You don’t even know who’s human anymore, or what’s real creative work out there. And the saddest part is that we’ve defaulted to treating everything as fake or artificial. It’s understandable, but disheartening, that people online are losing the capacity for empathy.
I joined social media in the first place to create an art account that would give me the motivation I lacked to pursue my creative path. I naively thought that finding a community and committing to it would give me a reason to push forward and start creating more consistently. And I can’t say it didn’t work for that purpose. But I had no idea, back then, that the cost of that would be creativity itself.
Over time, the pressure of constantly having to think of content (that I didn’t actually enjoy making, most of the time) made me lose the joy of creating. And again, that’s unfortunately not just a me problem. We all know social media has become extremely toxic. But I think certain groups are especially vulnerable to that—and artists are definitely one of them. I genuinely think anyone who says you can be successful on social media just by being a good artist is shamelessly lying. You have to be a good content creator first.
I realized I thrive in invisibility and anonymity. I’m only creative when I have the freedom to make things no one but me would care about. And art only matters to me as a result of my creativity—not as a product.
So, from now on, the plan is to stick to this website as my single online platform. I’ll try to finally come up with a very modest newsletter—that I’ve been promising for years since the site launched. 🙈
And as for connection, I reckon the old-fashioned way of meeting people out in the real world is much more rewarding. Like the little girl at my first market who screamed “FROG!”—all excited when she saw my Froggos 😁— and to this day, she means far more to me than thousands of online people ever could. ❤️
