Reclaiming my own attention
The price you pay for using social media
Hallå pals!
Jonas here with another issue of Indie Notebook to get some ideas out of my noggin, and to inspire you to do the same.
I’m back! That break ended up a bit longer than I had intended! It was very much needed though. I feel recharged to keep this going now. Buuut I will step down the cadence slightly, instead of posting every week I will settle for posting every second week. Mostly for my sanity. I do way too many things. :- )))
Somehow over 100 new subscribers joined the newsletter during this 2-month break??? I think it’s because my friend Wren made some great posts recently and they are recommending my newsletter. Either way, welcome everyone!
Incase you are new here and don’t know what I do, I do a couple things.
I make a weekly comic strip called Space Deer.
And I make indie games, my first big game was Surmount. It’s a roguelike climbing game. It’s out on Steam and Nintendo Switch (it’s actually 50% off right now)!
And I’ve just reached 99% completion on another game project that will be shipping soonish. That’s actually the main reason I extended my break from Indie Notebook. In upcoming issues of this newsletter I will probably talk more about the making of that game and on my progress with other game projects.
I’ll talk more about that another day!
Reclaiming my own attention
My whole adult life I’ve been checking several social media sites per day, mainly twitter (recently bluesky) and instagram. I rarely took the effort to click myself over to the tab of people I follow, I would just hang around in the “for you” tab and let the algorithm wash over me. I never checked the hours per day I waste on there, but it’s probably been a lot more than I like to admit. The feeling of this being a waste of time was enough to make me consider, “maybe I should care more?”
And then I found the book Digital Minimalism by Cal Newport was included in my Spotify subscription. I’m not done with it, but it has already made my feelings about this much more clear.
I’ll try to break down the basics of what I got from the book so far.
To begin with we get phones and social media accounts for good reasons. We want to stay informed about stuff we care about (friends, family, interests, work). But social media apps are not designed with this in mind. They are designed to hook us. They will pull lots of tricks to accomplish this. For instance, the facebook feed is filled with garbage celebrity gossip and shit posts. To get to the feed of posts from only friends we have to do a series of unintuitive clicks. Which doesn’t align at all with the reasons we get facebook in the first place.
This is a common point for all social media platforms. The way we end up using them is not in tune with why we join them in the first place.
And the price we pay for this is our attention. Anytime boredom starts to loom, the first reflex is to reach for the phone, to check notifications and jump between social media apps. Social Media is abbreviated SM, same as Slot Machine. Coincidence???
Cal used a line from Virginia Woolf in his book. It stuck with me.
“A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction.”
My understanding is that Virginia (1882-1941) was talking about this from the perspective of women’s rights. She meant that women need a break from serving men, to get seclusion. Which is required to do deep thinking.
Now our phones are always with us and rob us of this deep/free thinking. So now it’s not just women who struggle to reach this state of seclusion. We all do.1
In this way the big tech companies are suppressing freedom of thought across the whole world. But the way they do it is just sneaky enough and just pleasant enough for us to not notice or complain.
Realizing all this made me sort of lose my taste for social media. Being on there makes me feel uneasy. When I do log on I usually just check some messages and leave.
Now I try to reach for a book or a sketchbook when I get the SM-itch. When I don’t feel like doing either of those, I just let myself sit around and be bored for a few minutes. It’s not as bad as it seems.
It’s too soon to say how this will impact my creativity, or if I’ll just fall back into old habits. But I do feel more peaceful right now and that’s worth something in itself.
Mini Notes
🎥 Movie - Perfect Days
This is a rare movie about a man without great ambitions. The main character lives in Tokyo, he cleans public toilets for a living and has a very nice, simple, repetitive life. And he’s perfectly happy with it. He doesn’t dream of anything big, he’s just satisfied.
It made me question my fixation on ambitions. Maybe I don’t need them? Or maybe I can be satisfied and ambitious?
Panel of the week
(from Space Deer)
Thank you for reading Indie Notebook! I’d love to hear what today’s issue made you think about.
Also let me know if there’s anything specific you’d like me to talk about in a future issue of the newsletter!
Take care and have a creative week.
We all do struggle with this problem of deep/free thinking, but I do agree that Virginia Woolf’s original point stands true. It’s harder if you’re a woman and expected to do more housework and stuff like that.
The moment I stop filling my time with social media I start getting new ideas for drawings and while stories. I feel the struggle of breaking free of the scrolling habit!
About boredom, I notice only when I let my kids be bored for a few minutes (screens off) do they start to engage in imaginative play, almost as it creativity can't happen without botedom. I wonder for myself if the reason why I feel uninspired or unmotivated to create sometimes is due to the fact that I don't often let myself get bored.🤔