Late to the Party Newsletter
There's Too Many Social Media and I'm Tired
If it's not Twitter, it's TikTok, or Bluesky or Threads or Instagram or Hive or Cohost or Peach—ENOUGH!!!
What am I meant to talk about on every single one of these? Do I crosspost the same content? Is that redundant? And how would that even work when IG is photo based but TikTok is video based and Bluesky/Threads/Some Other Twitter Equivalent is text based?
How do people come up with “content” every single day? Daily skits on YouTube Shorts, hourly Stories or Reels on IG, a minute by minute analysis of the latest pop culture micro-trend—what the HELL is “clean girl aesthetic”?
Bo Burnham was right—there is everything and anything on the internet and for some reason, I was born during a time where being on the internet is very important to my writing career. Not just because people want to always know what I'm up to but because in order to sell books, I have to cultivate a parasocial relationship with my readers by being “relatable?”
I cannot be relatable. I barely talk at all in my daily life. If I'm lucky, I'll have exactly two conversations per day, one with my mom and the other with my roommate. (Technically three conversations if we include the baby-like cooing noises I make at my cat Bugsy. But since he can’t talk back, I don’t think it should count as a conversation.)
Beyond that, I cannot muster up the energy to do anything beyond small talk.
And while I'm at it—who decided small talk was a bad thing? Small talk is great. It provides just enough socialization that my body doesn't kick-start the evolutionary process of carcinization process—thereby cementing me as a literal hermit crab—but not so much that I leave the interaction with the frayed nerve endings of an anxious chihuahua.
And now there's social media? And TOO MUCH of it? God help me. I mean, I'll do what I can but Christ alive.
If you ask me, I’d much rather do this semi-regular newsletter.