Everyone is way too thirsty

Social media is good as it provides a channel of distribution to reach people with your work. But it also makes people very thirsty for attention

image via flickr creative commons user Brian Auer

"The hunger for attention is the enemy of genuine creativity." —Unknown

A shift has occurred from the internet’s original nature as a vibrant, weird, iconoclast place of creators making (and/or sharing) niche, wonderful things. Short form social media’s success, particularly image and video-based platforms, have transformed much of our beloved creative sanctuary into a place us early users can scarcely recognize. The forum days are long gone, and to use social media wisely now is to recognize its potential for distraction while harnessing its power to amplify our work without letting it consume us. It’s a delicate balance I want to talk more about today. As Blaise Pascal famously remarked, "all of humanity's problems stem from man's inability to sit quietly in a room alone." The obsession with digital validation shows this discomfort with solitude, our yearning for distraction. We might tell ourselves it’s just effort to market our work, but is that always true?

The type of person who “consumes content” (sigh) within something like a TikTok stream or Instagram story (and probably Spotify too, honestly) is the antithesis of a true fan. They don’t really care about anything and are looking for the next dopamine hit, not to engage deeply and connect. Like a moth to a flame, they are never going to dig deeper into something interesting they find because it’s not really about the creator or any one artist, it’s simply about “what’s next.” It’s mindless addict behavior. Your conversion rate from these things will be near 0. I’ve personally seen this true since the Digg days, where I saw traffic to my sites converted at a dismal level (vs, say search traffic which has intent) and the bounce rate was always around 99%. I go viral occasionally on Twitter/X and the new followers from these lightning strikes can be counted on both hands each time. It’s to be expected, it’s just the user behavior (note: I do think the non-viral, community aspects of text-based social are fine). So if you’re spending time purely trying to ‘go viral’ anywhere, it’s probably not great. If you have the resource, sure have someone cut up your clips, ideas or videos for short form. Celebrities with teams do this, but you might not even need to. You should be striving for a higher quality audience, the few people left that aren’t spending their precious, fleeting moments on Earth on glued to their cell phone hitting refresh.

So for an artist, or really anyone who is looking to build an actual community and not get some worthless engagement points or low quality followers, social media presents a unique challenge. The artist's essence lies in the purity of creation, in the raw and unfiltered expression of one's inner world. When this expression becomes tainted by the pursuit of likes, shares, and followers, the artist risks transforming into an entertainer. Even the business person risks wasted effort here (this isn’t really what you’re after, likes will not pay the bills). Entertainment seeks to please, to garner attention and approval, to pander. Real art is the antithesis: it dares to challenge, provoke, and exist independently of external validation. The motivation is inherently intrinsic.

Attention is a currency and social media is a large marketplace. When we engage with this marketplace, we step onto the "treadmill of attention," where the speed is dictated by how much audience capture we suffer from. Our creative impulses become chained to the rails of the algorithm, and we find ourselves creating not from a place of authenticity, but from a desire to “maintain relevance.” The problem lies not in the fame itself, but in the ceaseless pursuit of it. In a way this behavior is not so different than the addicts on the other side of the trade chasing dopamine.

This treadmill of attention is seductive. It offers the illusion of validation and success. Yet, it’s a trap. It’s a kind of feedback loop that leads to an empty place devoid of soul and humanity. By surrendering to audience capture, we risk losing the essence of our creativity, our ability to do something timeless and transformative. We become performers in the digital circus, our worth measured by vanity metrics rather than enduring impact. It’s really another form of digital nihilism.

What you need is to find a delicate balance: social media, used very consciously, can be a way to distribute your work, at least a taste of it. But it must not overshadow the work itself. The artist's primary allegiance is to their craft, not their audience. It requires someone who is uniquely bold and steadfast in their vision to stay true to themselves and their craft and not pander. This is also the only way to build trust, the higher valued currency of the internet (it is not mere attention or social shares).

The challenge is not to reject social media outright but to use it with intention and restraint. To let our work speak for itself, rather than allowing the medium to dictate its message. Art, ideas, people even businesses endure because of their substance, not their visibility alone (ask any marketer: advertising can only take a bad product so far, they speed-run this all the time). And again, don’t be thirsty for the wrong things. Be thirsty for your craft, not some arbitrary pixels.