If you’re a friend of mine you may think I’m a little crazy. If you get notifications when someone follows you on social media, particularly Twitter or Instagram, you may wonder if I’ve lost my marbles. Every couple of months you may notice that I’ve once again re-followed you for the second or fourth or tenth time (it depends how long we’ve known each other).
I’m not trying to get your attention or elicit a re-follow or send any message of any kind. What’s actually going on is that you just passed the relatively extreme filter I use when it comes to my social media lists.
Well, when I put it that way it makes it sound like I have some kind of sophisticated system or algorithm I run to create the most impactful, useful, and interesting social media feeds. That would be pretty far from the truth. What actually happens is that I generally start with a pretty small group of core people I enjoy or I think post interesting things that I like to follow (folks like yourself, obviously). However, over time I keep adding more and more folks to my lists. I follow a little bit more indiscriminately. I get an itchy follow finger, basically.
And then one day I wake up full of self-loathing for how little creative output I’ve had or how deep into a procrastination hole I’ve fallen and I look around for the quickest fix that will give me some immediate psychological relief. Given my minimalist tendencies and proclivity for extreme behavior in that direction, that often means wiping all my social media accounts clean. Back to zero. All gone.
And that feels good for a couple days or a couple weeks.
But then I realize that my lack of creative output or deep procrastination had very little to do with my social media accounts and I feel the void that they were filling in my life (social connection with real people, a steady stream of interesting and relevant content, the occasional easy, breezy entertainment, etc.) and I decide to start using them again. And then I start re-following folks.
And that’s how we get to where I feel the need to write an article about why I just re-followed you for the ninth time.
I try to write everyday. This is part of that. Have a thought? Tweet me, yo.