The Tragic Brevity of Time

The life that conquers is the life that moves with a steady resolution and persistence toward a predetermined goal. Those who succeed are those who have thoroughly learned the immense importance of plan in life, and the tragic brevity of time ~ W.J. Davison

I’m not getting any younger. Obviously, none of us are. But to be completely vulnerable here, I can feel it more now than I used to. I can feel it in my knees. I can feel it in my back. I’m a little slower doing some things, a little weaker at times, a little more - dare I say it…frail - and it sucks. It absolutely sucks. 

In case you’re wondering, I’m 57 years old. (No, I do not have any illness that I am aware of, so this is not a thinly-veiled revelation or secret message or anything like that. I’m just being honest.)

So as I begin to realize that I am not immortal (HA!), and I recognize that I have some unknown expiration date, I also have started to think about time. More precisely, I have begun to think more about how I use my time. We are all given some number of days, and we don’t know when it ends, but I can guarantee I am closer to the end than the beginning, by a long shot. So, I am starting to get a little more selective about where my time goes.

What I Used to Do

For years I posted on social media on a near daily basis, because YOU HAVE TO in order to create awareness of your art in a very crowded and noisy world (which gets more crowded and noisier by the day). At least, I thought you had to do that. I thought it was required. How else do you get your name out there? I thought I had to spend my time constantly on social media, sharing this and that and trying to make a name for myself. Everybody’s doing it, so I did it too.  It’s how marketing gets done these days, right?

To some degree that is true, and honestly it works well for a lot of photographers, and many seem to be great at it. Maybe they even enjoy it. And if they like it and want to spend their time on that, more power to them. It’s certainly none of my business what anyone chooses to spend their time on. Some even make some decent money on social media, I imagine. And in that case, it makes sense to do more of what is paying the bills.  

Plus it’s not my place to tell them otherwise (what do I know?), and I am clearly no expert in any of this. I have no idea what I am doing with respect to marketing or self-promotion on social media, to be fair, though I suspect a lot of others are like me. Everyone is just trying stuff and trying to figure it out. There’s no instruction guide for this.

How I Feel About Social Media Today

But I do know that being on social media constantly is an ENERGY VAMPIRE and a total time suck for me, and I don’t want to do it very much. Sure, I will post some things, because I enjoy the (somewhat limited) interaction, but I cannot find or manufacture enough sustained interest anywhere in my soul to get out there every day and share, share, share like a lot of photographers do. I’ve tried it, but it never sticks. I just don’t want to do it, and I’ve decided that I won’t do it. (Plus there are too many sites to keep up with these days. It’s just overwhelming. I wrote a bit about that here.)

The other thing is that it honestly makes me wish I was somewhere else, doing something else - all the time. I am naturally interested in traveling (Army brat here, so moving around a lot is second nature to me). However it’s not practical right now for me to be that mobile. And since I am being brutally honest here, I get a bit jealous when I see these photographers I know (and plenty I don’t know) out there shooting in these amazing locations, all the time. It seems like the only thing some of these folks do is travel and take photos. I wish it was me. I’m dying to get out there and shoot. I love that stuff, and frankly don’t do enough of it.

What I Would Rather Do

So instead of doom scrolling on social media, I want to spend my time doing things that are much more fulfilling for me. That would be taking and editing photos, or making courses or videos for YouTube (which you can argue is a form of social media, but not entirely - I think of it as a search engine and an educational discovery platform), or writing here on the blog, or doing something outside of my little world of photography, which could be time with family or friends, or traveling, or hiking, or watching Game of Thrones, or eating tacos, or having a cold beer with an old buddy. It could be all sorts of things.

It doesn’t matter what activity it is for me. It may be completely different for you. What matters is what it gives me: energy and fulfillment. All of those things are the opposite of the energy vampire and time suck and jealousy that I feel when I spend too much time on social media. These activities (and many others) rejuvenate me, make me feel whole again, and restore the levels in my happiness bucket that seem to get drained when I spend too much time on social media.

So that’s one of the reasons I’m not on social media as much as before. I can’t bring myself to do it. I kind of don’t care anymore, because I don’t get much out of it in terms of refilling my happiness bucket (although I love to see beautiful photos, and I love to support my friends when they post, so that’s a positive). My bucket mostly gets emptied by time spent on social media.

I Get Paid for This…Barely 🤣

It’s not like I’m making a living via social media, anyways. Yes, I make a few dollars, but for example my latest payment from Meta for my 12,000+ follower photography page was $0.18. Yes, eighteen cents. And that was for an entire month. (I do better on Youtube, where I have a bigger following, but it’s still not much money. And in the scheme of things, having 12,000+ followers on a Facebook page is not that big by modern standards, so I get that.)

In fairness, I haven’t been posting on Facebook as much, but the most I ever made from Meta was maybe $30 in one month, and that was a one time thing - a real outlier. All the other payments have been very small. And the month I made $30 was BUSY. I posted a lot, had a few photos get several thousand likes, hundreds of shares, and more comments than I could ever keep up with. It was nuts, to be honest. It was too much.

But it faded as fast as it arrived. I’ll never know why it happened, or how, or if I did anything to make it happen. It just happened. But honestly, despite the ego boost you get from a lot of positive feedback about your art, and a few dollars that might cover a cheap lunch for two, I used to dread logging in and seeing all the activity. I try to respond to most comments on most platforms, but I just gave up that month. It was too much and it wasn’t true engagement - just random strangers and surface level interactions. It was high-volume, meaningless interaction. 

And I don’t have the energy or interest to try to replicate it. The juice wasn’t worth the squeeze, as the saying goes.

I Just Want to Enjoy My Time

Being this late into my life, I want to feel good and spend my limited free time doing things that make me feel good. I used to care a whole lot about how many followers I had on various sites, but I don’t even look any more. I don’t care about follower counts these days. And so many of these massive follower counts are either bought, or bots. 😀  I just care about other things these days. Social media followers isn’t one of them.

I’ve realized I can only do so much with the free time that I have, and I want to utilize that free time as well as possible for the greatest possible personal benefit in terms of my happiness and health, while also giving back to this community to the greatest extent possible. And that means not endlessly scrolling on social media and trying to become “popular” or whatever the heck you call it.

I guess it comes down to this: I’m not a “social media photographer” or “influencer”, and don’t pretend to be. I don’t even want to be that. I just want to do what I want to do, and being glued to social media is not on the list.

So What Am I Going to Do?

The challenge, of course, is that “everyone” is on social media and if I want to grow my photography business (and I do, so it’s a bit of a conundrum), then I have to be on those sites. So I am there, somewhat, and I engage there a little bit. It’s just not deep, or meaningful. It’s surface-level essentially. But that’s all social media is anyways, so I guess I’m not really any different. I’m just there less often than others.

Here on the blog I can go deep on a subject and (hopefully) write something that is meaningful to a reader or two. I can write about things that I care about, delve into a subject, and engage with anyone reading in a more tangible way. It has more depth and more meaning. It’s more fulfilling. It can be a conversation. It feels like it matters, at least to me.

Will I reach more people this way? Nope. Not even close. But will I add more value to anyone who engages compared to a “post and run” activity on social media? Absolutely. That’s the goal. I hope I achieve it. I’m certainly trying.

But most importantly, it’s more satisfying to me. And that’s where I am right now.

Where are you?