jessa

Since I started uploading YouTube Shorts, I’ve been posting them on schedule, knowing deep down that I am peddling for views. Who am I doing this—getting high views—for anyway? And playing the numbers game (once again) has messed up my head, giving me a sense of activity without actually moving anywhere. The result? I feel accomplished, then empty, and so I refresh again.

I have been a slave to pull-to-refresh again, the dreadful place I have become increasingly familiar with. Like a slot machine, I’ve been refreshing the analytics page to see how many new views I’ve received or if my post even gained anything at all.

The lure of it is hard to fight because it’s engineered to keep you in. My addiction to Facebook and Instagram just shifted into another medium—what a disappointment. I thought I was already out of this hamster wheel.

I hope that a day will come when I use social media and I don’t have to act in a script anymore, like a marionette finally moving according to her will. For now, I’ll start with what Jenny Odell wrote in How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy:

…doing nothing means disengaging from one framework (the attention economy) not only to give myself time to think, but to do something else in another framework.

Today I woke from a stupor, out of the engineered analytics trap, and had the mental space to go out in the backyard and listen to a cacophony of birds and chickens, and finally finish the book I’d started two weeks ago while swinging under the shade.