I’m continuing my series on Social Media and the Influencer™ Culture and how it’s disrupting our society. It’s turned us all into idea machines, into personal marketeers. It’s incentivized us to gain (F)ollowers and build (I)fluence by playing to the darker emotions—anger, fear, pride, lust, and the like. It’s created a culture of denial, and it’s led too many of us to believe that good ideas and deep work can’t be pushed forward without using the social media apparatus. In all of this, it’s created a milieu of dependency and addiction.

I know a thing or two about dependency and addiction. I’ve wrestled with the demons that live in a bottle of gin (or whiskey or whatever). I’ve studied dependency and have explored the spiritual realities underlying addiction. And in my latest book, The Book of Waking Up: Experiencing the Divine Love that Reorders a Life, I wrote particularly about the addictive groove of social media.

Consider this excerpt from The Book of Waking Up (and grab a copy if you haven’t already).

89: Groove #5: Social Consumption

What is social media but technological heroin? It’s a distracting hook, an attention manipulator, a time suck. It’s equal parts feast, famine, fear, ego, and political dumpster fire, and the content (at least the non-advertisement content) is created by the people for the people. It’s our method of mass communication, our way to be heard, our method of connecting with people when we’re alone. This centering of our own message, opinion, need, whatever—doesn’t it etch a groove?

No matter how much I swear it off, I always end up back on the social-media sauce. Why? When I’m alone, my brain plays the groove in the record: Media brings the fix.

Humans were created for social connection. It’s that need that drives friendship, marriage, societal harmony. What happens neurologically when we make those social connections? First comes the oxytocin—whizz-bang. Then comes a new rush of dopamine, fixing the memory of that whizz-bang firmly in place.

The science behind our attachment to social media is certain. We seek connection—even if a virtual, cotton-candy version of the real—and Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, even LinkedIn facilitate a kind of connection. (Even now, aren’t you thinking about social media? Even now, can’t you feel the dopamine firing up the striatum, can’t you feel the tug toward virtual connection?) Scientists—even the ones working for the social media giants—know that social media primes the flow of dopamine in the brain, dragging us to the reward of this electronic connection. They know that every time we update our statuses, like other people’s statuses, or receive a like on our statuses, every time we reap the reward of social media use, our brains release more dopamine, locking the memory of this virtual connection in place.

But it’s not just the need for connection that drives our habituated desires toward social media. The social-media giants also use certain psychological tricks to stimulate the release of more dopamine. What are those tricks? Unpredictability, incomplete satisfaction, and the cues of potential rewards.11 Consider:

Unpredictability: What is social media if not an unpredictable hodgepodge of family photos, angry political banter, adorable cat memes, and touching parenting videos?

Incomplete Satisfaction: Can 280 characters tell the whole story, convey full conversational nuance, or create complete connection?

Cues of Potential Rewards: Don’t the notifications, the hums, buzzes, and dings of your cell phone drive you back to social media platforms time and time again?

These features drive the cycles of desire, of want, of fixation, and each time we reach for our cell phones to satisfy the craving, the feel-good chemicals, including dopamine, etch the groove a little deeper: Social media brings the fix.

A Word on the Experiment

If you’ve been following this series, you know I’ve been conducting a little experiment. I’ve been wondering: Is it possible to build a robust writing platform without using social media to promote the work? As a result, I’ve gone off the social media sauce cold turkey. I have not used Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, or any other social networking platform to spread the word about this series. Instead, I’ve invited you to (a) share your thoughts with me by responding directly to these emails (even if I can’t read them all), and (b) spread the word via word of mouth and email.

The result? The experiment is working, and It’s all because of you.

Since I started this series, I’ve experienced almost 5% growth on my daily mailing list. My Substack subscription has been closer to 10%. And though the numbers aren’t the point, I think it proves my hunch: You can build a writing community without using the social media platforms that drive so much anger, hate, lust, and pride.

Today, I’m asking you for two things in furtherance of the experiment:

(1) Consider picking up a copy of The Book of Waking Up for a friend (that friend can be you if you' haven’t read it yet);

(2) Shoot me an email letting me know what you’re building outside the social media ecosystem. It might be a business, like my friends at Milagro Midwestern Spa & Collective in Overland Park, who philosophically refuse to use social media. It might be something simple, like a backyard chicken house or an online course curriculum for the COVID era. It might be a series of poems. The sky is the limit here, and I want to hear about it.