Social Media and the Creative Doom-Spiral

in which I explore the mental health and creative consequences that come from having a perpetually-connected Twitter-brain

Have you ever noticed that you can’t be bored? Or, perhaps to put it more accurately, you’re constantly bored—always roaming, anxious, from one app to another to another, scrolling through your feed in a state of semi-consciousness, a restless spirit damned to eternal dissatisfaction?

Yeah, we’ve all been there.

This boredom is unlike any other as it is induced by the constant consumption of a counterfeit world filled with counterfeit identities and emotions. We’ve grown not only detached from reality, but actually bored by it. We have become people devoid of real feeling; numb to the wonder and beauty of the physical world and the real, messy characters who inhabit it—afraid to even encounter it, really. Afraid, as Huxley put it in Brave New World, of “that interval of time between desire and its consummation.”

Because our Twitter-brains demand instant gratification, we’re finding it increasingly difficult to create, to produce, since creativity relies on a quiet, open mind and feet that have recently touched grass. Not to mention, it generally takes a lot of time. So instead, we turn the channel to static and let it hiss.

This noise has become something of a comfort to the modern mind in the way that a night light is a comfort to a child frightened by the dark. It’s woven itself so tightly into the fabric of our lives that we actually fear what we’d do—who we’d be—without it.

What if we lose touch? What if we lose followers?

What if we invest time into something that ultimately fails?

What if we fade into the oblivion of a silent, techless world (or, like, 1999)?

The horror of being nobody is induced by this bizarre yet enticing illusion that simply existing within the digital world (aka the fake world) automatically makes you Somebody.

And thus, we enter the Creative Doom-Spiral.

The Doom-Spiral is what happens when, in an attempt to occupy one’s mind or, as we sometimes cleverly put it: “find creative input,” one turns not to a book, not to music, and certainly not (God forbid!) to the great outdoors or a blank, silent page, but to The Feed.

This is the worst thing you can do if you want to produce art. Don’t ask me how I know.

Creative input (which we do need!) is not to be found within the inch-deep ocean of a social media feed. Sure, you might stumble across a hidden gem, but it would be only by pure luck as you slog through the mud of endless commercials. By this point, the Doom-Spiral has already got you, anyway. If you’re paying attention, you can recognize the moment it happens: you make a mental note of the post that piqued your interest, and you keep scrolling.

And you keep scrolling.

Down, down the rabbit hole.

By the time you realize you’ve lost thirty minutes of your precious free time, you can barely remember what you came here for. (What was that post again, and why did you care?) You realize, morose, that you might’ve spent those thirty minutes reading a chapter from that novel collecting dust on your nightstand, or even writing a bit of prose of your own. You might have gone for a walk or written in your journal. In fact, you might’ve done anything else and you’d have been happier. You come away from the razor-thin world of The Feed feeling shallow, stupid, and unimaginative.

This is just the beginning of the Creative Doom-Spiral, so buckle in.

Irritated at this sense of time wasted, you resolve to make the best of the next thirty minutes you have, so you sit down to do something tangible, something real. Something that, hopefully, will make you feel human. However, just as things are growing still and you’re settling in, something disquiets you. Your mind begins to wander, your gaze cuts toward your phone—is it near?—and before you know it, you’re opening Twitter just one more time. Just for a second, and that’s it, you promise yourself.

It's a lie, and you know it’s a lie.

At this point in the Spiral, one of two things usually happens:

1: You tell yourself that it’s almost time to get back to work and you don’t really have time to do whatever it was you were going to do IRL, anyway. Besides, you’re already feeling shallow, stupid, and unimaginative, so you may as well stay where you’re in good company.

2: You tear yourself from the enchanted glass and try to refocus. Breathe. It really was only a few seconds, after all. But you can still hear the static hum in your ears, and despite your efforts to ground yourself in the moment, you never quite feel like you’re all there; ideas, inspiration, that damned and elusive muse still refuses to show itself.

I hate to break it to you, but the Creative Doom-Spiral is not something that can be exited easily. It must be intentional, and it can’t be brief. It’s not enough just to close the app and put down the phone; you actually have to disconnect the wires of constant input and flat, disjointed discord. Yank them from your brain where they’ve become embedded like a parasite. Only then might you chance an encounter with the muse.

The muse is a tricky creature (always has been). It’s a creature that likes to lurk in the peripherals rather than showing itself directly. It slides about the edges and sneaks in the side, coy and silent, as an article I read recently put it. The muse is a creature not made for the fraudulent, astroturfed realm of social media where noise and chaos reign supreme.

No, if you want to find creative inspiration, you’ll have to look outward. You must turn off the night light and give your eyes a chance to adjust to the darkness, from which will emerge sharp angles, sounds, and strange, interesting creatures, all too real and wild and complex to be confined by an algorithm.

The pod and the screen are waiting, but you must resist the urge to flee. In just a few minutes, the sun will come up and the world will glitter, colors visible in shades you never remembered.

We can’t delete the digital realm (there’s debate about whether this is good or bad), but we can change our relationship with it. And if we ever want to be free of the Creative Doom-Spiral, we must. As a culture, as a society, but first as individuals.

It has to be intentional. Pick up a book. Go outside. Read long-form content instead of Tweets. Write something every day (or if you’re a mom, like me, as often as you can). Resist the urge to indulge in passive, shallow consumption. Live in the thick, vibrant world of reality and eventually, you will learn to be fascinated by it again.

And then, you’ll make art.